Last month we decided that we’d start a book club of sorts at Fight, and we started reading Clayton M. Christensen’sThe Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s a book that is at the heart of many different aspects of what Fight does, so it was good to get into it and discuss.
This time it was Justin’s turn to choose and he picked Chris Anderson’sFree: The Future of a Radical Price. The book has done the business book of the moment circuit so I’m guessing that a lot of you have already read it. I’d love to see what you thought.
Next month it will be Mickey’s turn to choose, so if you’ve got something you think we should read, send him your suggestions.
Because the difference between marketing strategy and marketing tactics can be difficult to grasp, I thought I’d take a quick shot at defining how Fight thinks of them. I’ve tossed in goals and metrics as they are important parts of the mix and are easily confused with both each other and (typically) goals are sometimes mistaken for strategy.
Here we go:
Goal
Goals should be the first thing created for a marketing project. A goal is what you are trying to achieve. Goals often break down into two groups: business goals and marketing goals.
Business Goal
A business goal is typically (but by no means always) associated with money. So a business goal might look like this:
Increase revenue by 5% this fiscal year
Marketing Goal
A marketing goal typically exists to support some business goal. So a marketing goal that supports a business goal about revenue, might look like this:
Increase product awareness by 25%
Notice that neither goal gives you something specific to do. Goals are focused on the outcomes that you want, not how you want to get to them.
Metric
A metric tells how you’ll know when you’ve reached a goal as well as how the goal will be measured. So a metric for the marketing goal above might be:
The number of potential clients responding that they are “somewhat aware” or higher on our annual prospect survey will increase from the previous year by 25% or more.
In both of the goals above, the target was given (“5% revenue increase”, “25% awareness increase”). Goals won’t always have these targets right in them, but metrics should ALWAYS include the target.
Strategy
A strategy describes the approach that will be taken to accomplish the goals and should include as much relevant information as possible about why you are taking this approach. The strategy provides the guidance for the individual actions taken on a project. When evaluating what tactics to use, you should be able to look at the strategy to determine what is “on strategy” and what is not. A supporting strategy for the marketing goal might be:
Since our prospects spend a large amount of time online, conduct high-volume advertising on the online properties where they spend most of their time
Tactic
A tactic is each thing that you do in support of a strategy. There may be only one tactic, or there may be hundreds depending on such things as budget and timing. Some possible tactics for the sample strategy above:
Buy run-of-site ads on ESPN
Advertise on Facebook
Test response to Twitter advertising
So there you go, a quick and dirty overview. Toss your questions in the comments if you have any, and let me know if there are other marketing issues that are causing you (or others) confusion.
Here’s another entry in the info-snacking firing line that we call “Get in the Ring”. The topic that I had 3 minutes to cover (without any prep) was: The Big Idea.
For the uninitiated, the Big Idea is what advertising companies (and, increasingly, all marketing companies) sell: The OMG moment, captured in a 30 second commercial, magazine spread, web site, or banner ad.
We’re big fans of the Big Idea, as a rule. The problem is that it is typically the end of the conversation about reaching an audience, where as we believe that it’s really just the beginning.
Anyway, here’s me taking a shot at this unexpectedly after I drew it from the 60-odd other topics that we had to blindly draw from.
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
Goals
A key piece of information that you’ll want to know for our Naked Campaign is what our goals are (this is typically the first thing that we set up on a regular client engagement). Having goals is critical because that is what lets you know whether you have actually done good work or not (all of us at Fight have worked on award-winning projects that never actually accomplished what they should have).
Given that we’re a high-consideration good, and that windows of opportunity with the potential clients that we hope to reach are rare, our primary goal is to get people to subscribe to the ongoing content that Fight produces. This content comes primarily in the form of a blog (which you are currently reading), and our company Twitter account. So the primary goal can be stated as:
Goal #1: Increase the number of people subscribed to Fight content
As a secondary goal, if we can’t get people regularly engaged in our content, we at least want more people to have heard about Fight and know what it is that we do. That goal can be stated as:
Goal #2: Increase the number of people aware of Fight
Metrics
You may notice that for Goal #1 there is no specific amount that we’re trying to increase subscriptions by (which we would normally establish for a campaign like this). This is because this will have been the first real marketing push that we’ve done for Fight. As such, we will be looking to establish a baseline from which we can measure future campaigns. We’ll do this by both looking at what the total increases that we’ve gained through this program, and looking at the increases versus the cost to get those increases so that we can compare that with other approaches down the line.
Of course, we have a starting number of people subscribed to our RSS feed for the blog and our Twitter account, so this is what we’ll be building on.
For Twitter, as of the writing of this article, we have 176 direct followers. We are also on 16 lists which have 82 additional followers combined, for a total of 258 followers on Twitter.
We only recently started running our RSS feed through Feedburner, so it’s not clear how many people are actually following us this way, but a 7 day rolling average shows about 18 subscribers as of this writing (we use a 7 day average because Feedburner numbers vary heavily from day to day).
For Goal #2, we’re also setting a baseline, but things are a bit trickier. If we were operating from any kind of real budget, we’d do periodic surveying against our target audience to see what the uptick in awareness was, or we’d do surveys of people exposed versus not exposed to see what the lift was, but these are outside of the scope of our current budget, so we’re going to have to measure awareness by proxy.
For this goal our proxy metric will be unique site visitors during the campaign, averaged over 30 days. We could use ad impressions here, but for our purposes, they’re a pretty weak indicator of awareness, so we’ve opted to assume that if they actually click through to the site, they have a base level of awareness. Google Analytics tells us that our baseline is 534 unique visitors in the last 30 days.
So there you have it. In upcoming entries, we’ll show you the ads that we are running, the keywords we chose for AdWords, and we’ll look at some A/B testing on the landing page. And, of course, we’ll update with stats as we get them in, and let you know what changes in approach (if any) we’ve taken based on that information.
We’d love for you to jump into the conversation below. I’m guessing no small number of you have suggestions for how we should proceed, or what we should have done to begin with. Let us have it! And if you have questions about how or why we’re doing something, we’re happy to provide that info as well.
We have always believed that having people experience our process is the best way to convince them to hire us, so we asked ourselves how we could incorporate this into our campaign. And then it hit us: The Naked Campaign.
We’d expose our process for what we thought about and what we did with respect to this free advertising, including the results. And we would talk about this in our advertising. We thought that by incorporating what we’re doing into the advertising itself, we could create content that more directly spoke to the people that we wanted to talk to than other ads on the page, and that the ads would do a better job of drawing people in to the project. They would click through to a landing page that described our challenge, and that linked to the parts of the story that had currently unfolded, with new parts being added as we went through the campaign to help create a story that people would want to come back and check in on. As they did that, we’d continue to update our blog with other content as well so that they could get other exposure to what Fight is all about.
At the same time, we would see if we could foster a conversation with folks who already regularly checked us out. We felt like this kind of program would be worth talking about. We’re going to expose as much as we can, so likely we’ll do something interesting, and probably we’ll screw something up, but we’ll definitely be exploring in a way that we hope invites collaboration.
The campaign officially kicks off on July 9th, but, as you can probably guess, this series of articles is already a part of the process. We hope that you’ll at least stay tuned to see how things go (the good, the bad, and the ugly) via RSS or Twitter, but, even better, we hope that you will chime in with best practices that you have used, questions about what we’re doing, what you think about the program and the like. You should leave us a comment below . So go ahead!
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
It’s worth taking another moment here to point out that a key factor in this opportunity is the very small number of people that are likely to be exposed to it. $75 worth of AdWords and $250 worth of DirectAds is a good place to start, but it’s a very SMALL way to start. We’re looking at getting a few 10s of thousands of impressions in the best possible case (and potentially much fewer than that). Given likely click-through rates (we’re guessing well under 0.1%), we’re looking at driving about one hundred of potential prospects somewhere, so we need to make them count as much as possible.
The first step for us is identifying our target audience. This is important generally, because it allows you to start getting into the head-space of the people that you want to click through on your ads. On Google’s AdWords, this is important because it can guide you towards which search phrases you want to place your ads next to. On LinkedIn’s DirectAds, it will help you choose the kinds of jobs that your target is likely to be in.
So who are we targeting anyway?
Given the clients that we’ve worked with, our areas of expertise, and the cost of a full-blown engagement with Fight (though there are certainly a wide range of ways of engaging us) our target is a person in the marketing group who has control of a budget of $100,000 or more in a company with annual revenues of around $10 million or more. Our target prospect should be considering a digital marketing project, but can be anywhere from looking to take the right first step into the space to looking for a progressive digital marketing company to help with a sophisticated online project. They don’t have to believe in the power of a good strategy, but they do need to care about results.
If we were doing millions of impressions, then we could expect that some of the potential prospects were already in the window of opportunity for us and we would therefore have at least a few leads capable of immediate conversion (all other things being equal). Since there will be very few people clicking through (because of the small number of impressions), we’ll have to make as much of them as possible. Which suggests that a more appropriate approach than the “Big Ad” is a campaign that draws potential prospects into an ongoing interaction with Fight, giving us ongoing opportunities to keep our consideration high with them.
Targeting Options
With LinkedIn’s DirectAds, the targeting part is pretty straightforward: You choose the company size (in employees; we choose 201+ employees), the job function of the person that you want to show an ad to (for us, Marketing), and the seniority level of the person you want to target (Manager and Above for us). Done!
Since Google’s platform doesn’t have direct access to a lot of the information that LinkedIn has, you have few characteristics to choose from: Location (US for us), gender (not relevant to us), and age (we excluded 24 and below since those in the 0-17 bracket aren’t likely to be useful to us, and while there is some possibility in the 18-24 category, we have few enough dollars not to take the risk). From there you can decide to advertise on Google’s search, on their network of sites using AdSense (the “Display Network”) or both. If you don’t chose specific sites in their Network to advertise on (which we won’t, at least in the early stages), they keywords that you choose do the rest of the targeting legwork for you.
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
Aside from Consideration, the other major factor for people who might be interested in working with Fight is their window of opportunity.
Most people are not continually in the market for a new car. They buy a car and they’re good for a while. Similarly people aren’t always in the market for digital strategy. They may not have a project coming up for a while. On the other hand, you might always be in the market for a pack of gum. When you are presented with an opportunity to buy some gum, you might take it every time.
So the challenge for us (and any other company that has high consideration goods and relatively rare windows of opportunity) is to keep Fight’s level of consideration above potential clients’ minimum threshold long enough for a window of opportunity to come along.
So what does this mean for our advertising? It means that it needs to be a gateway to creating enough of an interest for ad viewers in Fight for long enough for a window of opportunity to arrive for them.
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
To get a better handle on what Fight might use advertising for, it’s worth taking a brief side trip on the nature of how people buy Fight’s “product” versus how people buy other kinds of products.
As I mentioned previously, Fight’s “product” is a high consideration good. That means that people put relatively more time and effort into evaluating whether or not to buy that good, and generally have more and stronger criteria that the product has to meet for it to be considered among the various options to buy. Cars, vacation properties, and colleges are all other examples of high consideration goods.
If you are in the market for these things, the odds are that you will spend some time comparing one against the other, and that some products that you COULD consider won’t actually be products that you DO consider because they don’t meet your minimum criteria. Worth noting is the fact that it’s not just cost that makes something high consideration. A product might actually be cheap but difficult to get (e.g. a free piano), or may involve continued effort on your part in some way (e.g. a dog).
Examples of low consideration goods abound, but some quick examples might be gum, a deck of cards, or an umbrella hat (some things just sell themselves). These things are generally so cheap you don’t think about them, easy to get (except maybe for the umbrella hat), and have very little in the way of long-term repercussions (except, again, maybe for the hat).
So, we got an opportunity to do a very small amount of free advertising for Fight. It was intriguing, but advertising for Fight is not an obvious choice. There are are plenty of reasons that we might not consider doing it at all (much less in the tight confines of LinkedIn’s 75 character text ad):
Digital strategy (our product) is not typically a low-consideration good. It can be expensive, which means that advertising is unlikely to lead directly to work for us.
Our value proposition is potentially complex. Making any kind of point about why digital strategy is beneficial, and why Fight is the right company to do it, in just a few words and in a way that isn’t trivial is quite a challenge.
The ad space is crammed with all kinds of companies screaming that their solution is the best, making it difficult to grab a person’s attention in the first place. These ads are focused primarily on low-cost tactics that promise quick ROI and use language that is very direct response-focused (which makes considerable sense for this medium), creating a large attention barrier for us to have to break.
This made it all the more important to have an answer to the question: What (if anything) can we do with these offers that will create actual value for Fight? The next couple of articles will explore this question.
It’s anotherexample of a major brand looking to crowdsource ways of making themselves better
In this case it’s focused on marketing (even though it says advertising, their definition of advertising is over-broad)
We like to use opportunities like this to flex our brains with, poke at our process, and generally have a good time
We had not heard of this program from anywhere other than TechCrunch (see The Target Audience, below)
There’s actually precious little information to go on for GE Ads. In the best scenario, this is because GE is treating this not as a one-off contest, but as a long-range funnel for innovative work from unexpected places. In a less-good scenario this is because someone at GE thought that the idea was fun and went ahead with it with little thought (which is not a bad idea in itself).
In any case, we felt we were game, so we spent 120 minutes on it. Here’s how it played out.
Who’s Your Client?
GE has a HUGE breadth of products. We considered focusing on specific products, or even just specific major product categories, but, since we didn’t have any collective expertise in any one area, digging in to any one of them and trying to really understand what GE was doing and where the opportunities were, was beyond the scope of the time limit that we had set for ourselves. Besides, the scope of the request, while open-ended, seemed to be about GE as a brand overall, and not particularly about a product category.
The Target Audience
Again, not having done any sort of discovery (beyond what 30 minutes of web searching will get you), we decided to focus on the average consumer as the target. Business-to-business relationships are tricky to quickly understand if you don’t have some experience with what the target audience wants. On the other hand, we all have experience being a consumer, so it seemed like an easy headspace to get into. Ultimately we narrowed the audience down to Advanced Digital Literates because:
We are them, so we have some idea of what’s going on there
This project so barely made our radar (only due to Ned’s keen attention to things like this), but was so squarely targeted at people like us that it seemed to point to an opportunity that we could take advantage of
It turns out that, not having any information to the contrary, we thought that the broad consumers were probably being served quite well, actually, with the campaigns that GE is currently running (see below for more on this). We’re sure that someone in GE could give us evidence that there is a serious failing somewhere – in which case we’d tackle that more head on – but, barring that, we had to go with what we knew
The Goal
Again, given that there is not much to go on in terms of this project, we took a fairly generic goal:
Increase brand affinity volume with broad reach
What We Know
At first we didn’t think we knew much about the umbrella brand that is GE with respect to marketing. But it didn’t take us long to realize that GE’s advertising had actually reached us (which was especially surprising to me, as I’m nearly unreachable with advertising – a fact that I’ve decided to take as amusingly ironic). The ad campaigns are broadly inspirational, speak to the positive idea of “imagination” and talk about how GE improves the world. We’d seen ads on TV, and their digital ads were pretty solid. In fact, a campaign that they ran a few years ago, where you could create new ideas on a shared whiteboard, seemed downright inspired (though, of course, we can’t speak to its success).
Insomuch as umbrella advertising doesn’t seek to sell anything directly, these all seemed to be on the right track. And reflecting on our own feelings we came away on the positive side of neutral on GE, which is pretty good for a brand that we don’t knowingly consume on a regular basis (unlike, say, Coke).
Our Key Insight
GE has the opportunity to own a real concept of “imagination” in the marketplace, beyond what they currently do.
Our Strategy
GE creates the groundwork for inspired ideas. GE should provide the digital infrastructure for digital natives to bring new wonderful things into the world. Inspiring innovation and providing the framework in which it can grow.
By doing this, GE reinforces, in a very concrete way, its ownership of “imagination”. It creates affinity for GE in the people who are actually using their imagination to make the world a more interesting place. It also provides an interesting opportunity for GE to expand its business into a new space that is consistent with the image it projects (see the tactics section, below).
Tactical Approach
Specifically, we would like to see GE collect, build, foster, and own tools to help people spark new ideas, nurture those ideas into deeper concepts, and bring those concepts into reality. GE should be the company you think of when you want to figure out something new to bring into the world.
We envision a web site called imagine.ge.com which would provide a range of tools that GE has actively helped develop. Most tools would be free. This would include tools such as:
Community Ideation Platforms (e.g. Salesforce’s Community offering, which powers Dell’s Ideastorm, or, ironically, Google’s Moderator, which is what GE is using for this project)
Community Idea Acceleration Platforms (I don’t know of any in the wild, but have built a couple: systems that allow people to see other people’s ideas and get involved to the degree that interests them)
Basically an entire ecosystem devoted to the imagination/innovation process from creating the initial spark to making the idea a reality. We see this infrastructure as the “ideas” equivalent to Amazon’s Web Services, which provide essential services for new web applications without the need for a company to build the infrastructure themselves.
We imagine GE expanding upon these layers and integrating them into a more complete workflow.
The kicker would be for GE to make this infrastructure the foundation of how ideas grow within GE. This provides added incentive to improve the tools and added credibility to both the tools and to GE as a company that practices what it preaches.
In our biggest version of this concept, GE creates a new business unit around creating “imagination” infrastructure of all kinds (potentially capturing the brand space that Disney evacuated after Walt died), they create a global incubation program, get involved in 3D printing (maybe through the RepRap or MakerBot projects), and buy Adobe both for its creative and technology development tools.
All of this provides additional emphasis on GE’s classic jingle “We bring good things to life”.
. So go ahead!
