As I have dove fully back into my business I keep finding or being suggested tools that are interesting but I am not sure if they are useful. I used a tool the other day that showed me a map grid and how we rank in hyper local pockets. It showed me this, and gave me some statistics and that was it. It was interesting but I am not sure it is useful.
There is a difference between information and action. Acting on correct data is important, but data with no suggested action is far closer to useless than it is useful. Knowing might be half the battle, but if we don’t even know what the battle is the knowing serves no purpose.
I want to dive deeper and find an answer, but at times I am not sure what clue I am even looking for or what problem I am trying to solve. A website is a useful tool to no longer be a website anymore. Websites have become signals for other authority sources.
We are living in what marketers are calling a zero click reality. People are more and more turning to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for answers, and not getting any further than a Google Business Profile in Google. I get so many calls from people looking for Pet Care Vet or Pet Care-A-Lot because they didn’t even bother to look at the phone number they are calling and just called the first one they found.
This is the reality and right now most people have no answers even if they claim they do. All we can do is work towards old methods and hope those signals carry over to the new ones. That is where my focus has been in trying to market the product. Being the head of both marketing and sales my job is both to get eyes on the product and to convert those eyes to sales. We have information, but what we don’t have is the ability to comb through it and know what is useful and what isn’t.
I go back to the tools I see advertised nearly every day. Tools offering the answers. Tools that say they are going to tell you exactly what is what. Tools that are the key to open the new digital doorway and guide your business into the future.
I still feel that the best advertising is delivering high quality service. What does it matter if your marketing is great if your product stinks. Recommendations carry far more weight than anything else, and there is no tool that can read the air and know where your business is mentioned in casual conversation.
My father used to complain about advertising saying it was something you had to do with no idea if it was working. Today’s marketing has a lot more information than the old days of print ads, but at the end of the day we still don’t know if it is working because the information we collect is always going to be more interesting than it is useful.
David Huzzard Writes 