If you think about discoverability at the outset, it can lead you in directions that are not only innovative for most web publishers, but remarkably easy to achieve and chime with the best in best practice. Discoverability is one of the strands at the heart of what makes the web such an exceptional media channel. Think of these two digital mega-brands: Google and Amazon.

Google: learning from the experts in getting found Google helps customers find what they’re looking for at the every moment of their greatest interest. Whether it’s the paid for advertising links of the free ‘natural search’ listings, the engine has had billions of chances to refine the way it displays results to ensure only the most relevant get discovered. The starting point is to look to match page content to the terms being searched, and then by learning about what gets clicked, and applying a filter to the websites that could be shown based on how many other sites link to them, Google is able to provide a near perfect match to any question, every time. The simplicity of the offer to consumers has made it the fastest growing company in history and one of the world’s top brands. The ability for it to let anything be discovered has become the main tool every web publisher first tries to harness, and out of this a whole industry of search engine optimisation has been born.

Amazon: “people who like this also like this” Those iconic words sum up the keys to Amazon’s success. By any standards, Amazon is a best-practice retailer, but it’s not simply the powerful e-commerce engine and the incredibly broad inventory that’s made it such a success – it’s the cross promotion. Just as you are ready to complete an order, Amazon looks into it’s database to see what other titles were bought by people who also bought this particular title. A moment later the probability calculations are complete and a book you’re very interested in gets displayed to you. It’s why I hate Amazon: the site costs me a fortune, and every time I’m about to buy I end up doubling my order.

In both cases discoverability is the key, and while the principle might feel rather humble, the results on an organisation can be transformative. While Google and Amazon have some of the smartest collaborative filtering technology on the planet powering their ‘discoverability, the good news is that you don’t need expensive software and algorithms to achieve many of the benefits – just a good understanding of your customers and what they are interested in. Most organisations have the opportunity to cross promote. They have products or services that are in some way related to each other, and through this their teams can anticipate customer needs.

For example, if a travel business like LastMinute.com sells a flight, then it’s a natural next step to offer the customer travel insurance. A further step might be a hotel, or discount vouchers for a snack at the airport. Extending the model and it seems logical the travel store could expand into selling travel books, suntan lotions, ski-wear promotions, vaccinations and even the internet hosting space to store the photos and memories from the trip. The travel industry is a great laboratory for digital retail because online ticket sales started early and much of the switch to the web as a purchase channel has been completed, triggering whole new models for pricing the core products along the way.

The same could be true in healthcare. A patient concerned about chest pains might present themselves to a doctor with concerns about a heart condition. In this case the services they might me interested in could range from advice about healthy living, diets and exercise, through to support and counselling if they are diagnosed. Follow the arguments, and they might also be interested in information about the quality of care in different institutions, the charities and non-governmental organisations active in that sector, and maybe even the research into their condition. While the specific moments of information need may be impossible to predict, many of the associations and patterns are not.

In both the travel and health examples, the latent need or desire of the individual was present, but without discoverability, the connection would not have been made. It may feel a lazy generalisation to suggest that even though everything can be Googled and is only two clicks away, that’s too far for many – but think about the number of times you’ve visited a website and had that momentary thought about how something worked, or whether you could do something else with what was described? People need help with discoverability, and in the digital networked society, that means help from website publishers by making connections clearer and more effective.

Another aspect the two hypothetical examples share is that all of the content and services were already available online, but would be missing out their customers without better connections. The organisations themselves may have invested millions in their sites and services, but if the returns (the value) is a function of the number of people using them, then discoverability emerges as an amplifier, unlocking the investment they’ve already made.

The digital marketing industry is sometimes so obsessive about the future – the new tools, virtual worlds and technology devices – that it can overlook the most fundamental of things. Get discoverability right and the returns from your websites will mushroom.

Digital Action Plan
Discoverability: a ten minute exercise you can do straight away

• Take any one area of your business
• Make a list of what it offers customers
• Then walk through that list wearing the shoes of the customer
• Make a second list of customer needs; probably much longer than the first
• Prioritise that second list
• Then sort the points into two categories: those you can provide yourself, and those that are external to your organisation
• Think about the specific moment of the customer’s greatest interest
• Then think about how those pages could be reworked to harness discoverability, marrying up the right message to the right customer at the right moment
• What you do next is down to you

Links

• This is a simple exercise for getting started in online marketing. We devised a ten step plan to help provide small firms just starting out in digital marketing with a simple roadmap to get themselves underway. 10 simple steps

Need more?
If you’ve covered off the basics then look further into these areas of digital marketing for more:

• Search engine marketing, and in particular search engine optimisation
• Website design, and in particular navigation and usability
• Database management, and in particular customer profiling and analysis