While it’s perfectly okay to remain unaware of the ongoing growth rate in data, as a typical Internet user, it’s not okay for a Professional Web Marketer to do the same. We all feel the pace of change on the Internet. As a Web Professional that provides strategic advice or recommendations it’s critical to keep wrapping your mind around the velocity and subsequent impacts for your clients. While most clients are engaged in cost-reduction strategies, helping some clients understand the benefits of advertising can be really challenging. Keep reading. This may help.

Many smaller clients are still learning to embrace cost-reductions gained from SaaS ie; the cloud using services like Google Apps or WordPress or open source platforms. Many clients are still learning to calculate total costs of ownership. A balanced scorecard would reveal that cost reductions in advertising should be mindful of lower customer acquisition costs.

More than clicks, views and other digital actions, professional online marketers understand how to create and manage successful advertising campaigns that consistently pull “market share” for a client. The challenge in local digital economies where most web professionals serve small business is to keep themselves and their clients from what I would call, Cliff-diving.

Cliff-diving is when you become stagnant. In the case of web professionals it’s when you learn about and even master a particular SaaS, software platform or even a stand alone tool and stick with it too long. Consider the auto mechanic that gets certified for and makes a career out of working on carburetors never learning about fuel injection. This is happening to many professional online marketers in the advertising space.

Cliff-diving used to be okay for Web Professionals. Jumping into tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver has worked for millions of web professionals. But in the advertising space, everything is changing more rapidly. A web professional betting their career on any platform could easily find themselves looking for a job in a few years as more agile web professionals come onto the scene.

Time will tell if the data explosion which I believe we’re now experiencing is geometric or exponential but it certainly continues to create a lot of digital energy. Harnessing this new form of energy can help your clients reduce costs and attract new customers. The rise in Internet traffic, lead collection forms and more cookies are all creating more data than we can mine and keep anonymous. Read “Introduction to Shannon Entropy.”

Online advertisers may similarly consider astro-physicist attempting to explain our Universe as new planets are being discovered on a somewhat regular basis. Or it may help to consider a metaphor by Nicolas Negroponte (read: Being Digital)  when he suggested that we’re shifting from processing atoms to processing bits. In my humble opinion this explains today’s opportunities in manufacturing. Use this to understand advertising as a form of manufacturing if it helps your clients.

Please also consider helping your clients by thinking of mom and pop websites where the best data is available as a result of providing the right service or product. In other words, a single, small, niche website owner may have access to better information about a customer’s behavior than Facebook considering the fact that Facebook is currently locked into a digital environment. Many of your local clients have cash registers. It’s going to take a lot of QR codes for Facebook to ever achieve the quality of data a local website can successfully mine. The “a-ha” for me is realizing that each client will be capable of owning their own ad network and this ability will be built into the code.

So the awareness shift might be in knowing that website visitors, even those most concerned with privacy are still leaving bread crumbs behind that tell us way more about their behavior than existing digital networks like the open graph are capable of providing.

While some of the most capable Web Professionals have chosen the path of cliff-diving it’s encumbant on future Web Professionals to help customers go beyond existing networks and harness the opportunities within their customer base. Learn to leverage existing while securing new data by helping your clients understand the need to learn as much as possible about their visitors, customers and prospects.

This is the data they already have access too and the data that you’ll help them access via new strategies and tactics to help your clients “own” and build their own ad network functionality into everything they do online. Offline opportunities in particular will help them reduce costs and attract new customers.

A potential take-away: Web Professionals must learn new ways to serve clients using innovative data collection techniques that respect the privacy of the customers your clients serve.

Continued from part one.

This page has been combined into part one for easier reading. :)