Rethink The Funnel – Why Real Estate Is King

By now those who know me are tiring of my constant cry, “Real Estate Is King.” I’ve been telling anyone who’d listen for the past year and a half that your brands need to be owning property all over the monopoly board. Just owning Boardwalk isn’t going to cut it.

What does that mean? Since the dawn of the internet we’ve all been following the same funnel based model for success:

1. Run a bunch of advertising
2. Have the call to action for the advertising be to the brand’s site
3. Get people on to the site
4. Convert the people

In applying this model we were trying to drive traffic to 1 destination. In doing so, the focus was always on Unique Visitors. The baseline and focal point for success rested on increasing the number of unique visitors. If you were estimating a conversion benchmark of 10%, having more unique visitors increased the total number of conversions. Makes sense.

But, in leveraging that model, we didn’t take into account all the other interactions taking place throughout the web. Often these interactions were smaller…micro if you will. Despite being small, they definitely mattered; and they still do.

As companies look to engage consumers where they are (Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, etc.) something interesting is going to happen. Unique Visitors to the site are going to decrease. They’re going to matter less because the funnel isn’t linear.

Best Buy and Amazon recently announced that they are going to make their inventory available to any and all developers who want to create apps, widgets, or the like so that sales of the product could happen on this site. The idea is that they don’t care where the sale takes place, so long as it takes place.  The path to purchase isn’t linear. Think about it. You could be on Facebook with the Amazon App installed, see a deal on that book you added to your wish list, and then buy it right there…with NO need to visit Amazon.com. Now, that’s value.

But, what are we going to do about those decreased traffic numbers? The implications are huge. Online publishers set their value based on their audience size. Is your site less valuable because it now gets less traffic? Again, maybe the real point is we need to look beyond unique visitors when determining what success looks like.

Make no mistake about it, real estate is king. If your focused on hoping people land on Boardwalk you’re going to lose this game. Start buying up property now.