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[0:00:02] Female Voice Over: Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!
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Taylor Martin: Hello, and welcome back to the Triple Bottom Line. Today, I’d like to introduce you to Mike Stratta. He is the founder and CEO of Arcalea, a Chicago-based consultancy, focused on marketing data and design science. Yes, that is a thing. And I cannot wait to dig into today’s conversation. Oh, my God. Mike has also been a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Loyola Quinlan School of Business and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. He’s a two-time Inc. 500 honoree and has worked with many known brands across the board. Mike, I’m so excited to have you on today’s show. Can you tell our listeners more about your career and how you came to start Arcalea?
Mike Stratta: Well, first, thank you so much for having me, Taylor. I appreciate it. It’s so much fun to be a part of this. Yeah, I was in the industry for about 15 years, just in a general market prospective. We were working on, you know, everything in creative to television, radio, and print and had a great run, as you mentioned, with some household named brands. And right around 2010, started seeing a shift in the market. If you look at, kind of, the history of ad spending, it’s right around just before TV peaked. Television advertising peaked in 2014. Twenty-ten was around the time I mark as like the rise of all the digital channels, and they just started kind of climbing together. And would eventually overtake traditional media spending in 2019. But right around that time, we started noticing kind of this opportunity emerged for being able to specialize a little bit. It was then called digital marketing. I was looking deeper and saying, you know, “I think this is really where everything is headed.” And I had a history in information security before kind of branching off as an entrepreneur. We used a fingerprint firewall architecture and security infrastructure from the outside to get an understanding of what the posture towards kind of the world to be able and like, “here are your vulnerabilities. Here’s how we potentially breach them, and here’s what we should do to change that.” Immediately, it would spark a great conversation. And so, flash forward 15 years. I’m working in marketing, and I thought, “man, there’s this weird convergence of these two ideas. I think we can fingerprint brands digitally.” And for some brands, all that matters to them is their “digital posture,” and I think we can read the competition the same way. And if we put these two maps together, we can create a recipe to succeed. And, in fact, that was kind of the genesis for how Arcalea started.
Taylor Martin: That’s fascinating. But can you tell me more about that digital fingerprint or that digital report that you guys get? The ping, if you will?
Mike Stratta: Yeah. With regard to brands, is what you’re saying? With regard to companies?
Taylor Martin: Yeah.
Mike Stratta: Yeah, so, let’s just take a step back for a minute. Like, over, 99% of US businesses are considered small businesses. That’s a phenomenal, huge number. But this is a US small business association number. And it basically makes sense, you know, most of the US economy, by number of businesses, is small business. And when we start to evaluate that landscape, you realize, like, “man!” Many of these businesses are not known brands. So, there is an opportunity. The one I point to, perhaps most obviously, is something called share of voice. So, with any business, you will command a certain amount of traffic to your website. We call it organic traffic, but that is, in general, an attention, right? You command certain attention in the market. and you can go back to the 90s. There’s articles by Harvard Business Review that reference that share of voice as being a proxy or a close analog for market share. So, if you can measure share of voice, you can measure your market, they’re about the same. Now, for brands that people don’t know- for 99% of unknown named brands or brands that aren’t known to the household- market share is not something we kind of look at very much. And the question is if you could measure how much market share you had and you could figure out what the elements were that would affect market share, what would you do? And would you take actions on those things? And what we have identified is over 20 dimensions which you can use to look at establishing market share or establishing what that benchmark is, figuring out where in that universe you sit, and then figuring within the competitive context how you would approach changing your share of voice which would then affect your market share. Does that resonate? Are you still with me?
Taylor Martin: Yeah, I totally am. I’m just thinking, like, my mind is expanding into these 20 different areas of, like, oh, my God. There’s probably a quantitative, like, crazy report in each one of those steams. How do you make sense of all it? It just seems like it’s gonna be data overload.
Mike Stratta: So, I mean, that’s the big problem with big data is that the last 10 years has been like, you know, all these buzz words go from big data to machine learning and AI. So, the problem with big data is not that we can’t capture it. Because every automated system in the world from Googling analytics to ads all captures the data fine. The question is what do you do with it? How is it appropriately synthesized to turning it into intelligence? And so, let me back up one more time. Marketing, and for all intents and purposes, that means your kind of approach to the market or your business, how you generate value and money. Marketing is competition dependent. And that means without competition, you don’t really have a market, and without knowing what the competition, is you don’t really know how to approach the market with any degree of success. You with me so far?
[05:40] Taylor Martin: Yeah. But what about… Are you also going to track your competitors? Is that what you are saying?
Mike Stratta: That’s exactly what I’m saying. What I’m actually saying is if you’re not tracking your competitors, do you really understand the market?
Taylor Martin: Ahhh. I see. So, it’s like you can’t understand your market if you don’t know what everybody else is doing because then you’re getting the whole picture.
Mike Stratta: That’s exactly right. And not only that, if you haven’t decomposed or deconstructed the elements which create the success for any of your competitors then how are you to construct the elements that generate success for yourself? Imagine this: A simple example. You’re in e-commerce. The world is used to Amazon’s checkout process, right? They’re used to the user experience and the flow, etc. Now, would you just design an e-commerce platform from scratch and just kind of use your best guess on like what that process is, the conversion, the customer journey, etc.? No. You would sample the market, and the very biggest one you would go to is like, “how does Amazon do this? Because that’s a pretty good flow.” They’ve got hundreds and thousands of hours of experience with that and millions and millions of transactions to build on that tells you that that’s a pretty good process so you should probably start there. That’s the same analog that’s applied to any of our businesses. Look at what your competition is doing, figure out what the aggregate is, what the average of success is, and build upon that or exceed it in as many ways possible. But the key is to figure out which ones are actually leading to success and which ones are just incidental factors.
Taylor Martin: So how do you bring this data to your client so they can understand it? Because I feel like I could just see, you know, eyes glazing or a 2-inch report where they are just like, “oh, my God. How do I get through all of this stuff?” So, you’ve gotta find a way to bring it to them so it’s digestible, right?
Mike Stratta: Yes.
Taylor Martin: Because you’re measuring their competition. You’re measuring the market as a whole. And then you’re measuring what it is that they’re doing against what their marketing plan is, right?
Mike Stratta: Yes. And that’s where you start integrating things, like, actual conversion data. You’re starting to compare circumstantial information with definitive information. Because as soon as you can link those two things… plus with institutional knowledge. The CEO and the leadership team are going to say, “yes, I can see that this is an important variable” or they’re like, “no, that has nothing to do with our business.” So, there’s a little subjectivity and objectivity that goes in with it, but it’s all part of the great experiment of just saying, “let’s collect and analyze and let’s figure out what’s important.”
Taylor Martin: So, do you ever have clients coming back and just having a difficult time having it digest and really sink in? Or do you get pushback from the data?
Mike Stratta: So, what’s fascinating is none of us just looks at raw data, right? So, we don’t look at a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers and go, “okay, I don’t understand this.” So, we do create visualizations but, generally, it’s not something that’s rejected unless there’s no frame of reference. That can be a difficult one. Sometimes, for instance, you’ll look at micro goals on a website. Typically, it’s not binary. It’s not like they converted, or they didn’t, right? It’s top of funnel, mid funnel, and then you got a waterfall of, like, falloff as certain percentages and a final conversation. And sometimes there’s a bottleneck there. And one of the easiest analytics in the world is to look at that bottleneck and say, “well, why are people leaving here?” For instance, there’s an inordinate amount of drop off at stage four of five. And often times when you look at that data then you look at the potential root causes of it. It’s obvious once you’ve seen the data behind it. Oh, my gosh, like, the calls to action are so far deep. We’re interrupting the conversion process with these additional offers or something. There’s always something that afterwards looks obvious, right? But it’s only in light of the data story does the narrative of what is happening come into view, and I think that makes it a lot easier for leadership teams to say, “Ah ha. I can see that now. Yes, I can see that.” And that’s the key in the whole data environment is to translate it into a narrative that makes sense in a human experience. Does that resonate?
Taylor Martin: It does. And I’m just thinking about how when somebody comes in and they’re absorbing this information. I also would like to know, like, I can see them really wanting to know, “well, tell me more about how my competitor is succeeding” in this area or that area. I mean, you can bring that information to them, right? That seems like empowering them to then bring that into the fold of their, you know, revamping their marketing or shifting it somehow.
Mike Stratta: It’s absolutely true. I mean, I don’t even know where this phrase comes from. I’m going to out myself, but it’s something around keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right?
Taylor Martin: Right.
Mike Stratta: I don’t even know where that’s from, but it couldn’t be more true in business. I mean, without an understanding… I can’t say it enough. Without an understanding of the competition, we are negligent as leaders, right? Because everything shifts. There’s a shift due to the competitive context in the COVID world, right? How are competitors responding to this? Look at how Target’s drive up… My wife was just saying yesterday… And I gotta tell you, like, the Target experience of like ordering online and driving up and having it popped into your trunk and, like, driving away- it couldn’t be better, right? And so, competitors with Target needed to have seen this coming because their gaining market share from this one benefit, right? These are one of thousands of examples of looking at your competition. Look at Netflix and Blockbuster. Like, had Blockbuster seen this coming, we would still have Blockbuster today, right? So, unless we’re looking at the competition and the context in which we’re operating, we are not diligence to our businesses.
[10:50] Taylor Martin: Okay, now you’re really opening it up when you start talking about things like that for me. Because now I’m thinking like future proofing. When you’re starting to see something like this happen… I mean, COVID definitely threw a wrench into everybody’s life, right? But when you’re talking about how things are changing, you know, I could see people coming to you and saying, “okay, here’s our market. Here’s how we think we play in it. Go. Tell us how we are performing, how well we’re doing and if our idea matches up with what your quantitative data pulls out, right? So, then how can you, like, map out, like, a trajectory of how their market as a whole is moving or shifting? Can you bring some of that information to the table?
Mike Stratta: So, what is fascinating is that there are two parts to this. One is you may not know… If there’s no data or evidence for it, you may not be able to see it anyway and that gets into a whole another set of tactics. But the other half of this is that often times you have institutionalization at the leadership level, and there’s bias that occurs, right? “We’ve been successful. We’re always successful. We’re number one. Therefore, everyone’s following us.” And sometimes the data reveals a different story than the institutional belief of the brand or company. And so, this is what becomes really fascinating. And we just did this on a global scale for a global brand where they considered going into a new market. They wanted to understand the best approach to that market, but we engaged to help them understand what the story was from an underpin prospective- share a voice, market share, etc- and when we got the answers back, they didn’t align with the institutional belief. And so, it was a little bit of, like, “wait a second. You’re telling me this is true?” Or, like, that’s what the data says. Then the next question is, “okay. Well, keep going and prove it to me.” And by the end of about, you know, whatever the presentation, everybody is on the same page, and they’re, like, “wow! We did not see that coming because we believed ‘x’ because you get this echo chamber, right? This echo chamber extends beyond institutional knowledge and creates these belief systems and biases that we believe to be true. Even with a voice from the outside, it takes the narrative of the data that tells that story in order for it to pass through and become ingested as new believable, credible information. And it happens to us all.
Taylor Martin: I think that is something that is happening more and more frequently. I mean, I think about investors these days. They’re always worried about the next disruptor, in any market, you know? They’re just worried that someone’s gonna come out of nowhere or a couple of companies and do the same thing and just pivot or, you know, condense maybe one or two markets into another one or a new market comes up and just totally breaks the ground of everything else around it. I mean, I think these are gonna be our norms now because technology is becoming so pervasive in so many different ways that we never thought of and new ways of thinking about how to harness these newer technologies. I just see that people are always going to try to keep their pulse on how things are changing in their market. I think that’s gonna be something that people are going to be focusing on.
Mike Statta: Absolutely. And just in a COVID environment, look at the change in context around all business around us and understand, too, that to your very point, this data stream should be analyzed competitively on an ongoing basis. The question is do you do it annually? Do you do it quarterly? Do you do it…? The answer is it depends. It absolutely depends on how dynamic and how susceptible your industry is to dynamic shifts. I mean, as we’ve seen, social media messaging. Certain events in our common cultures can affect that dialogue and that data in the competitive context in minutes. In days, your business can change and shift. And so, it depends on the industry how often you should sample this information. But the fact of the matter is we’re in a world where they with the most information typically win and having the most information is something that you have to consider what is right for your business. What is the right timeline? What are the right metrics? What are those KPIs that you need to look at, both for your company and your industry.
Taylor Martin: Right. What about if a company wants to kind of see how their brand is perceived in the market in terms of okay you know, “we’ve decided to shift to be more sustainable and we’re really focused on our people and things like that.” Can you actually mine some, like, emotional data? Things of that nature? Is that possible?
[15:04] Mike Stratta: Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly is possible. A couple of things govern that. One is how known is the brand, right? I mean, there are some brands that we all can name in a moment, but there are a lot in that 99% which are known more for the context for which they provide the business or service rather than the name brand. I just immediately think of, like, you know, when we think of diapers. I have an 18-month-old so this is fresh on my mind. When we think of diapers, we think of Pampers or Huggies or any of the other brands, but we don’t say, “I need diapers,” right? We don’t go online and just type in diaper and not knowing the brand. But for that 99% of US economy or US businesses that are small business, we’re dealing more in the context of that space. More in the “where are diapers near me?” or “what’s the best solution for a runny nose?” We have to evaluate what part, where we are in that space, if we’re a name brand. And we’re gauging sentiment. That can be done on social often times. That can extend into press releases. And one of our customers right now has a news cycle that they were on the downside of, and they’re kind of evaluating how prevalent that it is. What is that share of voice? How damaging could it be to the top line, bottom line. So, it all depends in the competitive context or the brand’s context in how you would approach understanding the tactics that you would use to sample that information, but it is certainly sampleable.
Taylor Martin: So how do you deliver this information to them? You were talking about a presentation earlier. I’m guessing a really good walkthrough. Detailed charts. You take some of the data and put it into some charts and graphs and stuff like that to condense it down so they can digest it quickly. And then do you hand over like a big report and say, “here’s everything in print as well”?
Mike Stratta: Yeah, so that’s a wonderful question. I mean, the answer is yes. It depends on the depth and breadth. So, we offer ongoing marketing and advertising services as a key part of our analysis, but we often advocate for not beginning tactics until you have sampled the universe, right? And this goes back to one of our first points which is how we approach business, etc. And I will just share in our experience in the last 20 years and with hundreds of brands, companies overwhelmingly gravitate towards tactics and cursory data analysis, like, Google analytics and really topical top-line stuff. And, in doing so, they end up focusing on the wrong element in the first place because it’s easy and it’s there and it’s tangible and teams can take action, right? Your marketing team can do some things. But what happens is you engage in the ‘what we should be doing’ without thinking ‘if we should be doing it’ and to what business purpose are we serving? And does it follow kind of the marketing framework of real change and driving the business forward? And so, we advocate for first reassessing the business strategy in terms of marketing strategy in a formalized framework and then once leadership has all saying, “yes, this is exactly what we are doing,” then evaluate what tactics will support that business objective. And only then does… now you’re sitting in a place where you’re like, “I can use all this data. We’ve totally reformatted our framework, our marketing strategy. We know our goal and our strategy, and now we just need to analyze the tactic.” Now is when you want that universe of information to say, “which is valuable and which is not” in the construct of our framework of our new strategy, right? So many times, we get engaged where… We’re in this world of self-diagnoses where we’re like, “we think we need SEO. We think we need online advertising, or we need a new re-brand” etc. And often times, the answer actually lies higher up in that decision tree. And if it’s addressed there, everything below it falls right place.
Taylor Martin: Yeah, I can totally see that happening. So, you know, just to kind of recap here… You come in the door. You meet and great. You understand basically what their vision is and their marketing efforts and their company as a whole. And then you go out, do your digital dance and that digital footprint or fingerprint of that company out there, their marketplace. You come back with the data. You present it. You give them a report. You walk them through it. And understanding who they are, where they think they’re going, and then you show them where they are actually going. Then how do you move on to like next steps of re-targeting their marketing efforts or showing them, you know, really pinpointing the areas they need to improve on based on what their C-level, you know, executives are telling you what we need out of this venture.
Mike Stratta: Yeah. I’ll put it this way: I have not been a part of one yet that has not been an extremely enlightening experience for all involved where we all say, “okay. Let’s look at this. Alright, now let’s have a more strategic discussion around is the infrastructure in place to accomplish this, right? But everything at that point becomes very obvious and very easy. Is there a CRM or a CVP that can capture data and collect it in a centralized manner? Is our challenge more top of funnel or is mid funnel in the conversation process? If it is mid funnel, do we have the data traps or the streams that our required to improve an analyze over time? I mean, everything at that point becomes vary logical and tactical. You really are just saying, “where are gaps? Let’s fill those in, and let’s build.” But it’s getting to that point where everyone is confident in what we are doing and that it all serves the agreed upon business purpose… that is the, often times, the hardest part. And every time we’ve seen it in the past, we go in and there’s a tactic that’s getting ready to be employed, which quickly falls apart as soon as you ask a couple higher level questions. And so, yes, once you get to the table and all have seen now the new plan, it actually is pretty obvious. And normally the brand will take on, or the company will take on, portions of it, and we will simply help with the portions that they’re not comfortable with. And then, you know, you go through a round. You get everything in. And you can see over the next hill. And you’re like, “oh, but if we knew this and we could do this” then let’s build that, you know, the next bridge to the next… Sorry, my metaphor is getting slippery here.
[Both Laughing]
[20:58] Mike Stratta: …to the next mountain. And you get where I’m headed. But, yeah. It’s an exciting experience. We’re often times in these partners for quite a long time just because it’s a continuum. It’s like information security. There’s no arrived. There’s no safe. There’s just a continuum of risk, and the same is true for the infrastructure in marketing maturity. There’s no, like, “were done!” It’s always just a continuum of “what can we do better? How can we improve?” Can we get a little further out on the intelligence? A little further out in revenue? Prediction modeling, etc. All kinds. Now machine learning is a huge element that we’re implementing which is super, super fun. It’s kind of the nerdy, cool stuff that we’re doing.
Taylor Martin: Yeah, I remember the days when, five years ago or something, when people were talking about, “oh, yeah, we’re on social media. “We’re on this, this, and that platform,” and there would always be a sentence after that saying, “well, how do you know you’re making an effort? How do you know your money spent on all that is actually worth it?” And there was a shrug of the shoulders, you know? “I don’t know. We’re out there. We’re getting, you know, eyeballs and stuff. But are you getting quality eyeballs? So, I feel like, you know, you’re finally shinning that on that answer. And so much more. Could you like tell us some examples of projects, without, you know, being too specific of a client or anything, of course. But give us some examples of like some ah-ha moments you might have had where they might have been thinking one thing or you all might have been thinking one thing and then you find out something else and it just totally pivots and changes.
Mike Stratta: Yeah, so, I briefly alluded to one earlier for a global organization that, you know, gave us… “Here’s the competitive set. Here’s the market that we’re entering. Here’s what we think is happening and just wanted to make sure. We walk away, and we form our analysis and come back with a report. And this one is about a 300-page PDF report, complete with findings and recommendations, etc. And you could hear the quiet in the room. Like either this is wrong, or we have to rethink our approach. And the data was not wrong. I mean, data is data. So, it was an excellent example.
Another one, and this is a more tangible one probably for everyone, which is, you know, our organic search compromises over 50% of all our… it should, in it’s best case… compromises over 50% of our B to B and B to C customer journey. At some point, they are gonna check you out and they’re gonna Google something and be like, “how strong is this company in what they say they do,” right? It’s just either a trust signal or maybe that’s how they found you and came in top of tunnel, but it’s important. We’ll just call it that. You know, if you go to Google, Google.... for the SCO community, I’ll say… produces these findings or these recommendations for, let’s say, length of blog post, you know, or length of landing page or how many back links referring domains a certain page should have or a brand should have in order rank. They’re largely considered the benchmarks. The yard sticks. This is what you should do if you’re in this space. Now, keep in mind that that is a globally, across all industry, averaged recommendation. And so, what we decided to do is say, “well, what if you used machine learning to customize that?” Let’s say that we wanted, for instance, to rank for…. I’m just going to make this up…. Car rentals in Chicago. And we actually performed the search, and we came up certain rankings, right? Now, would that hold us next to Google’s recommendations or the industry’s recommendations? Because let’s just say we had a team that was employed to do this, but they were following the general rules, right? What we did was is we took 2000 observed sample data set. We looked at a hundred cities, and we looked at the rankings on the first page and not first page and then the top five. And through a whole bunch of processes, that I’m not gonna go into now, we were able to predict with the appropriate weight the variables that contributed to being on page one, and the variables that contributed to being in the top five. And they were not in line with Google’s recommendations. In fact, at times, they were off by 100%. So, the first thing is machine learning is becoming… This is part of all of our businesses whether or not we acknowledge it today or not. I’m kind of blowing the horn of warning, like, you should get on this train pretty soon because it’s a big, big deal. Because this is something we worked on for quite some time, but we were able to deploy it. So, we are creating basically personalized medicine. You can follow general rules or you can have a doctor prescribed stuff just for you. That is what machine learning promises to businesses in this capacity. It’s saying, if I want to rank for this and it promises to bring me business, I’m going to deconstruct or decompose the algorithms that produce a page one result, actually first 5 result. And now I know what the competition doesn’t know yet, and they might not even ever know it. It might be five years or ten years before it’s publicly available, easily subscribe-able information. But I’m doing it now, which means I’m going to get a jump on them, and I’m going to start reaping the benefits for my business right now. And I have the relative weight of those. So, anyway, it gets a little in the weeds after that, but you can imagine how important that could be.
[25:58] Taylor Martin: Yeah, sometimes I think about, you know, when you say machine learning, my mind is, I think, so far in the weeds. I keep thinking about my understanding the SEO, I think, has shifted so much in the last two years that now I feel like you have to find your niche, or your niche within a niche, or within a niche within a niche and so on. But what I mean is you have to really find your keyword or key phrase is really what it is. It’s usually two or three words that are combined to make that one search result that is so unique to your company and what you offer. But then when you choose those key phrases, you have to deliver on your promise, okay? What I mean by that is that if you have your listing that shows up in Google on page whatever or it’s an ad, but you have that key phrase right up there and the name of your company and then you have your description or your ad description. I feel like nowadays, whatever that is, you’re not trying to get eyeballs, you’re trying to get the right eyeballs. And if they click on that and go to your page and stay there for, I don’t know, thirty seconds or more, then I feel like Google then is like, “okay this is a worthy site for this specific keyword. You can own this space.” Google is kind of saying, “okay, this is right. This is good. This is delivering on the promise they were given.” I feel like that is really where everything is moving right now so that ultimately it creates a better user experience for everyone. For the whole internet. And, to me, when you say, “get on the train,” that’s what I hear. Do you concur with that?
Mike Stratta: Yeah. I mean, the sentiment behind the comment is absolutely right. I mean, it’s about providing value to the user. And Google is Google for all intents and purposes. I’m just putting everybody in a Google basket. But Google and the engines are evaluating continuously who is best suited to provide value. And then they’re rank ordering that. That’s just how it works. So, the sentiment behind it is absolutely correct. There are hundreds of variables that are at play meanwhile, and the question is which ones do we appeal to? Which ones do we modify in order to try and rank? That is really where I was headed with the analysis is saying, “Let’s stop guessing. Let’s spend but spend only to the degree that we need to and then reallocate to spend elsewhere. And without knowing this, by just following the general rules, it’s an exercise in futility if you think about it. If you’re like, “well, I’m going to follow general rules for a specific element, for a specific application.” Your directionally right, but you’re also incredibly inefficient. And, so, once you can know this… So, for instance, another application of this is, in your example, you’ve got one term that has a hundred searches a month, one term that has ten thousand. But if you don’t know the difference between them and you’re not optimizing for the better of the two and then looking at it through the lens of competitive landscape, like how hard is it to that, then you’re not really deploying the intelligence correctly.
Taylor Martin: I can’t agree with you more. I was just having this conversation just yesterday with somebody where I was saying, “okay, you’re going to have 8600 hits on this keyword but how many of the 8600 people a month are really worthy of you when you have this other one that has 600 but almost like all of those 600 search eyeballs are exactly who you need! So, think about the value of the number as opposed to how big the number is.
Mike Stratta: That’s true, too. And then I’ll just caveat with one element. If you look at the volume, you know, one of the analysis we do is a regression on the correlations between ranking keywords and estimated traffic. And you’ll find that its nearly impossible to just rank number one or the top page or whatever for just the ones you want to. You actually have to rank, for the ones you want in one through three, and then a whole bunch, like three to five time that amount, in numbers four through 10 and then five to 10 times that amount in numbers six through 100. So, what Google looks for, too, is the cannon of all the information that you’re known for and so while you may be targeting one, it’s impossible to think, “I just want this one” because if that were true, like, [Laughs] everybody would do it, right? And, so, one of the elements that is heavily weighted is the total contextual library of relative terms that you’re known for because Google is not gonna be like, “they’re really good at one thing.” They’re gonna say, “what else are you known for?” and is it relatively similar. Are you expert, effectively? And so there’s that, too, and so this is extremely complex, which is why using ML and saying, ‘let’s just figure this out once and for all,” then focusing your actions or your intentions on the things that matter, to your point, is it a conversion or is it for awareness? So, you could be known for it, but it won’t help your business but it may help with brand awareness or you can be approaching something that will covert and add to top line. So, there’s a business tradeoff there. But this is gonna be an all-day conversation by the way.
[Both Laughing]
[30:46] Taylor Martin: Yeah, it could be. And just to bring more context to what you were saying is, like, if your business was T-shirts or let’s say organic T-shirts. A little bit more specific, right? So, if you had organic T-shirts, that was your business, but you have to have organic T-shirts in blue or organic T-shirts in green. And I’m just using those different words just to say that you have to be organic T-shirts in so many things so then if you want to be known for organic T-shirts. That’s what you’re saying.
Mike Stratta: Yep.
Taylor Martin: I agree with that completely. I mean, we have clients that are doing that right now where they are getting on the train, on the wagon, just as you mentioned, and they are wrapping themselves around… They’re actually going after all the lowest hanging fruit, like the really long key phrases, and so they can then go after the main one- the big one- that they really want. And that’s gonna be a big pillar page. It’s going to be, you know, all roads lead to it, but they have to start owning all those other little ones to kind of grow up, if you will, to that big one because there’s a lot of competition in their space, not huge but still.
Mike Stratta: It’s definitely a long game. You can’t take your eye off the ball. You gotta put one foot in front of the other every single day.
Taylor Martin: The thing that blows my mind… I see this as, like, something you have to have. Because now, if you want to use a metaphor, it’s like do you want to be in the alley or do you want to be on main street, you know? Because if you are not having your key word structure or your website structure or your marketing and social… if you don’t have all that lined up, you will end up in the alley, and you will not end up on main street. And I feel like, you know, location, location, location. Everybody talks about that. Well, that is what we’re talking about here. It is where is your location on the internet, right?
Mike Statta: Uh huh. And that’s the whole point of the twenty-ten forward is for all intents and purposes traditional medial doesn’t have a play here. You’re not talking about magazines. You’re not talking about television. Location, location, location is digital. It’s all online. For all that matters, most brands, their only existence, the only evidence that you have a business is online. And so in that regard, nearly 100% about what we’re talking about is your digital footprint and the dynamics and the data that underpins that fabric. There are elements, like brand, which are intangibles and not measurable, directly, in this capacity. There are indirect measurements but… which is where I think you come in. There are elements of, you know, are you fulfilling your brand promises, are you trustworthy, etc. but from the prospective of awareness and how you’re going to capture top of funnel and at least begin the dialogue with consumers and partners, it’s 100% online.
Taylor Martin: I can’t agree with you more. And the part about the branding you that you brought up is, you know, I always see our work that we do as, you know, we are creating this skin that goes around everything. But we have to understand everything we’ve talked about in this whole podcast. We have to know everything up to this point and then know the brand and see the brand through the eye of the users and then how the company wants to be seen and make sure those align. And then take their brand and then coat everything that we’re doing in their digital word with that in mind. We’re, you know, window-dressers, if you will. But it’s an emotional thing. You have to be very empathetic and be able to bring that out of people so that, you know that personification of the company comes through, you know, all that.
Mike Stratta: Yeah. That’s well-said. And that’s why we actually stay out of it because it’s such a specialized additional dimension. We know what we love and we’re good at and when we rebooted in Arcalea, you know, having from a full-service agency, it’s exactly what I didn’t want. I wanted to say, “let’s focus here and not on brand. Not on subjectivity. Everything is objective and measurable. We’ll influence the design of the website through the data infrastructure and the AI analysis and everything else but not the translation of the brand into an emotional context. That is where we kind of draw the line. And that’s why having partners is wonderful.
Taylor Martin: Yeah, I agree. And, you know, I just love data. I just love it. It’s so fascinating to me. And to me, I just see it as all one big, enormous sized puzzle, right? How are you going to put it all together and then, again, we window dress to make sure it's on-brand on on-message, it’s delivering on the promise of the client’s proctor service.
Mike Stratta: Absolutely.
Taylor Martin: Well, we’ve covered more ground than I thought we were gonna cover today. I’m just totally ecstatic about this. Can you tell us a little bit about ways people can follow you and your business and what you guys do because I don’t see a lot of organizations out there doing exactly what you’re doing in terms of its breadth and the quantitative analysis of it.
[35:09] Mike Stratta: Absolutely. First of all, Arcalea.com is our domain.
Taylor Martin: Just to spell that out for everybody, it’s A-R-C-A-L-E-A dot com.
Mike Stratta: That’s correct. That’s right. One of our core values is wrapped up in innovation. We’re always trying to kind of push the line further and further. By the time this goes out, we’ll have two unique insights on machine learning on the site. I typically speak at the entrepreneurial communities and vistage and EO as a speaker and learning trainer, as you mentioned, at the universities at least in Chicago. I just love the concept and the dialogue around entrepreneurship, which lead us to our podcast which is What Makes Them Tip where we interview CEOs and leaders from the Inc 5000 fastest growing companies- vistage and EOer’s who are above two million in revenue and would love to share the kernels of information or the innovations that made their businesses possible. And so that’s a great way to follow us as well at What Makes Them Tip. In general, we’re always open for a dialogue on the topic, whether it’s with other professionals in the field, data sciences and decision sciences. My email is [email protected]. And we just in general love entrepreneurship and the journey of discovery, so those are great places to start.
Taylor Martin: Yeah, I agree. I love business. I just love business in all the facets and, you know, mechanisms and cogs in the wheel and how it all operates as a whole. And then the whole emotional side- the empathy side- is the part where I come in and really… That’s my gift, but I just love the data, man. I just can’t tell you how much I love the data. Mike, this has been a great talk. I know our listeners have got some really golden, solid nuggets today. So, ‘til next time everybody. Thank you for listening, and over and out!
Female Voice Over: Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewing on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.
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