Photo by Moritz Mentges
When tackling a knotty problem it is often useful to call on a specialist.
Someone with a deep knowledge in a particular domain is tremendously useful. They can call on years of hard-won experience to avoid the mistakes a generalist or a novice might make.
No one wants to hire a jack of all trades – as I once found to my cost some years ago when I paid a self-declared “handyman” to install a sink because our usual plumber was booked up. Big mistake.
But sometimes specialists can be so caught-up in the minutiae of their particular sector of expertise that they develop a blinkered view of the world, where the only way they can think to solve an issue is within the narrow confines of their area of focus.
Abraham Maslow wrote in 1966, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
And so if you want to generate more enquiries for your business, and you speak to a digital agency specialising in search engine optimisation (SEO), then it is quite likely that you will be told the solution is to achieve a higher ranking on Google.
If more relevant people can find your website, then naturally you will receive more sales leads.
But it almost certainly makes sense to take a step back and consider what else might be at play.
Driving traffic to your website might be an admirable aim, but if done in isolation it is unlikely to be successful in achieving long-term growth.
Other factors that will influence prospective customers might include whether they are aware of your brand, whether your website is beautifully designed, whether it includes information that increases trust and credibility, whether the user journey is intuitive, and so on.
Take another step back and it is worth considering how you want to be perceived, which customers are the most profitable, which are likely to become repeat customers, and how you can add value so they keep returning to you and recommend you to others.
As our business has evolved we have found the approach that adds most value to our clients is to bring a carefully selected group of specialists together for each project, and to work through a process that leans on individual expertise to build a picture of how we can achieve the best possible outcome.
We need to see the wood and the trees.
