Here it is. The most important concept in marketing.

VISIBILITY.

This is a very simple principle. Maybe too simple, because people talk around its edges all the time. Rarely discussed is the big picture view of it.

How visible is your brand, company, product or service line?  To your prospective customers that is. The people you are trying to reach.

If no communication reaches them, you stand no chance of selling them.

The greater the percentage who are being reached with at least SOME kind of communication, the more leads and sales are likely.

Simple. Important!

BRAND AWARENESS AND VISIBILITY

People do talk about “brand awareness.” But just try Googling to find out what the most well-known brands in the world are. There are articles about the monetary value of different brands. There are opinion pieces.

I couldn’t actually find the answer, is Coca-Cola is the most well-known brand in the world (It used to be everyone knew this)?

People aren’t focused on what’s important.

The thing is, awareness is the result of visibility.

If you want to increase your brand awareness, work on increasing your visibility. If you increase your visibility, you are going to increase brand awareness.

But you say, I’m a small business, what do I care about brand awareness. That’s true, and why we focus on visibility. Visibility matters whether anyone remembers your name or not.

MEASUREMENT

“Visibility” is a theoretical number. No one can actually measure it. Understand the concept. That clarifies thinking about your marketing.

It is the most important concept in marketing because it is the very first thing you have to do. Sheer volume of exposure. Forget about that and you are missing the boat.

The most perfect marketing, that only reaches .000000001 of your target market, is not perfect marketing. It’s completely inconsequential and will produce no leads or sales.

And while fully measuring your visibility is impossible, you can get partial answers. Marketers often use “impressions” as a metric. That measures the potential number of times your message may be seen. Whether actually seen or not, and whether or not seen by different people.

An example is the number of copies of a magazine distributed, in which an ad appears. Maybe someone didn’t open the mag to the page on which your ad appears.  So it is crude, but far from useless. Because it measures VOLUME.

The number of people who pass a billboard on the road in a day, is another. How many of the drivers looked up and saw the billboard? Who knows.  If straight in someone’s line of vision at a stoplight, that number is going to be higher.  But that is getting into quality. We are going sheer quantity here, because it’s the biggest mistake.

INTERNET PRESENCE

Let’s talk about this in terms of the internet.

Let’s call it Internet Presence. Define it as the percentage of potential prospects, who might run across you online.

It could be they receive your email newsletter. Or there’s an article about you on a website, or a blog post, or a mention in a podcast. Or a video on YouTube. Or on Amazon.

And of course, it could be by search on Google or other search engines. The page on which the result of your search is displayed? This is called in the industry, “SERPs” for Search Engine Results PageS.

It includes a number of opportunities for visibility – Google Ads (paid), organic rankings (earned rankings), local listing (Google Maps). How do you measure?

Google does provide some help. In Google Analytics you have a number called “reach” which is the number of different people exposed to the communication. You also have “impressions.”

Again, do they actually see your ad or listing? The higher on the page, the more likely they will see it.

But first, you have to get on the page at all. Of course, if you’re not on page one, you’re pretty much invisible.

VOLUME FIRST, THEN QUALITY

Never forget about the sheer volume of your exposure.

If you can greatly increase your visibility online, you can greatly increase your leads, sales and expand your business.

If you can’t, anything else you do is probably not going to produce the results you are looking for.

If you double the effectiveness of your ads, which no one is seeing, so what?

If you improve your ranking to #1 for a keyword no one is searching for, you still have no exposure.

So, the simple moral to my simple story: GET VISIBLE.