The value of eyeballs

In the 20th century, the success metric for marketing was eyeballs. But that’s just not enough for the 21st century. Relevance is the name of the game.

Consider these bits about relevance from the past week:

• From Seth Godin: “When your messages reach the right people at the right time in the right way, magic happens.”
• [From Marketing Experiments:] “Better know your customers and what they like and need instead of blasting them with generic info and offers. The secret word is relevance.” (Note: The Marketing Experiments post doesn’t appear to exist anymore)

Think about the importance of relevance the next time you’re about to do any of this:

• Putting a link in the comments on someone’s blog for the purpose of only getting some extra Google PageRank.
• Emailing a significant number of your customers just to hit a sales goal.
• Writing a blog entry without putting any original thought into it.
• Adding a stranger as a friend on Facebook.

People are dying for relevance. Google and Yahoo! work every day in pursuit of providing relevance to customers.

So stop being lazy and put in the elbow grease that relevance requires. Everyone else’s laziness doesn’t give you an excuse. It gives you an opportunity.