There’s an old saying that if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Marketing agencies and departments can have their own version of being a hammer. Depending on who you ask, you get a different answer to your marketing and business problems. Ask an SEO agency, and the answer will likely be that you need better SEO. Ask a web development firm, and you’ll probably be told your firm needs a new website. Ask a digital advertising firm, and the answer will be more and better ads.
None of them are necessarily wrong, but the way that people investigate and purchase services and products is different now than it was even two years ago. The internet is also much more crowded, so there’s a lot more competition for attention. It’s not solely about any one approach or tactic. It’s about being discoverable.
What It Means to Be Discoverable
Being discoverable means being presented to your target audiences where they are (both digitally and in real life). Most businesses have five audiences:
- Prospective customers or clients
- Current customers or clients
- Search engines like Google
- Press outlets
- AI
- Future employees (for companies looking to recruit new talent)
There are two types of discoverability: active and passive. Active discoverability describes how easy it is for someone looking for a solution, or thinking about a problem, to have any chance of coming across your firm. How easy is it for any of your audiences to learn about your firm if they don’t already know your name?
Passive discoverability means the ability for your audiences to come across your firm when they are not necessarily looking for a solution or a product. It is estimated that a person needs to observe your message at least seven times to be comfortable buying from you. These can be passive or active interactions with your message.
What Discoverability Includes
Discoverability is not determined by one or two criteria, but rather by the totality of your digital and in-person presence:
- Whether you have a website and how easy it is for people to use
- Whether your website is easy for people to navigate on a mobile device
- How well your website is optimized to appear in search results (including voice search)
- Whether you have content that can be interpreted correctly by AI
- Whether your company has a social media presence, and how effective it is in reaching your target clients
- Whether your firm participates in industry events, and what visibility you have
- How good your firm’s online reputation is (reviews, articles, comments on message boards and forums)
- Whether you run any digital ad campaigns and how successful they are
As you’ve probably guessed, there is no one single thing that will improve your discoverability. Think of it instead as a series of levers that can be pulled to different degrees to accomplish your goals.
For example, if your business doesn’t currently go to trade shows and it doesn’t make any sense to, a different discoverability lever, like social media or advertising, might be pulled harder to compensate.
What Happens If You’re Not Discoverable
Why should you care if you’re discoverable? There are two reasons: new clients and current clients.
The less discoverable you are, the less likely it is that someone who isn’t already a client will find you. This means that you have to work harder to grow your sales – and probably spend a lot more time researching and reaching out directly to prospects. This makes you more dependent on current clients and any referrals you can earn from them, even if those aren’t the best clients for your business. If your firm is discoverable, though, it’s easier for well-qualified prospects to find you when they need what you offer.
Discoverability matters for the hopefully small group of current clients that may be wondering if there is a better firm than yours. This client may randomly start searching for things like “best architecture firm in San Diego” on a Tuesday evening, fueled only by a passing curiosity about whether they themselves are working with “the best.” If the client sees your firm’s name among the search results, they are likely to move on to their next random thought (did they buy coffee creamer, what time is the game, is it supposed to rain on Wednesday).
On the other hand, if they don’t see your firm’s name in the results, what started out as a passing curiosity can become a concern about whether they did, in fact, make the wrong choice in hiring you. This can lead to increased and unfounded scrutiny of your work (because the client now feels unsure and is looking for reasons to justify that feeling) that can culminate in your firm being replaced.
Put another way, not being discoverable can mean you miss out on good opportunities and you put the opportunities you have at risk.
Challenges to Discoverability
There can be many reasons why a firm isn’t discoverable:
- You don’t have a website
- Your website is difficult for people to use – on a desktop or mobile
- Your website isn’t optimized for search engines, voice search, or AI
- The language you use to talk about your firm isn’t the language your target audiences use
- Your firm isn’t putting out enough relevant content
- You have no or ineffective social media presence
- The firm’s leadership has no digital presence (especially on LinkedIn)
- Your firm doesn’t participate in any digital or in-person events
- Your firm’s name is the same as a different but popular company, product or service
How to Become More Discoverable
The good news: becoming more discoverable is possible. It takes sustained effort, but even more importantly, it takes focus on your audience. It can be easy to fall into the trap of presenting your firm the way you would to a colleague instead of a prospect.
Your firm needs to be discoverable to the people looking for your services, and this means presenting information in a way that resonates with them. This doesn’t mean devaluing your services or expertise; on the contrary, helping prospects understand your credentials is one of the best things you can do for discoverability.
