We did an SEO/SEM campaign for a client that was completely focused on developing highly qualified inbound leads. The criteria was simple: Get potential customers to visit their site, then pick up the phone and call for more information. A secondary goal was an email request.

One of my first actions in planning this was to call the number on the website and experience what a prospect encounters… and it was not good. First, a person did not answer- I got a phone tree. My options did not clearly include ‘talk to a rep’ as the first option. When I did get to that option, I got voicemail.

A new customer for this business is worth 5-6 figures minimum revenue in the first year. Many become long term partners. An inbound call is a serious indicator of interest yet this otherwise savvy business was placing impediments every step of the way for that caller.

Our response was that before we even work on lead gen, they needed to dedicate a phone line and a live person to answer that line 24/7. This can be done with a call center whose script is to determine the caller’s physical location and connect them with the appropriate sales rep for that territory. The sales rep is trained that calls from this source are serious prospects that must be contacted within hours, at the latest (leads are time sensitive and rapidly get stale, often within hours).

Even before the lead gen work was done this change made a significant difference in sales volume. As much as I believe in the power of online marketing, the power of great service is far more important. Put the two together and things will explode.

The above quote is from SemanticHacker, the blog for a semantic search engine company called Textwise. Semantic search is the next generation of search, focusing on creating search engines that can take natural language queries and understand the relationships between the words in the query. It’s something that is difficult to grasp and equally difficult to explain as the quote above demonstrates* (and as my own attempt to explain also demonstrates). Yet it is an advancing technology that is going to have a big impact on our lives. Unfortunately, until someone figures out how to explain it in simple terms, it won’t have value.

As a professional communicator this is an issue I deal with everyday. In the semantic example, the best way to explain it would be to show an example, i.e.:

Type a request into the search engine: How do I make eggplant less bitter?

The engine understands the terms ‘how’ and ‘make’ mean there is a process involved. It understands that ‘eggplant’ is an object and ‘bitter’ is a characteristic of that object. Finally, it understands that the word ‘less’ is associated with bitter in a quantitative manner- we want less bitterness. After assembling all of this understanding it returns a search that has specific directions for making eggplant less bitter.

This is semantic search. Normal search just returns keyword combinations and phrases without this deeper understanding of context and the query: eggplant+bitter+less+how, etc. As a result you get more non-relevant results. Semantic search is an improvement in that it returns higher quality results.

In any business there is the need to explain the value of what you offer in very basic terms. I usually tell people that if you want tell your story in the most compelling manner you need to become your customer and then ask yourself:

What’s in it for me?

If you provide a strong answer to that question you will get your customer’s attention. If you don’t, you won’t.

*In fairness to Textwise, their posts are targeted to people with a very sophisticated understanding of semantic search. This just happened to be one of the more convoluted examples of a product description that I could find.