A Reality Check On Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy is not an easy game to play. There are a lot of moving parts, and you have to be willing to invest in the cost of doing business. Even then, it's difficult to judge how much success you're going to get from a particular marketing strategy.
But just because it isn't as cut-and-dry as some other areas of your business doesn't mean that you don't need one. You need a marketing strategy to support your business. And you need to understand what kind of return you'll get from various strategies so that you can make good decisions about where and how to spend your advertising dollars.
For many, the biggest problem with a marketing strategy is this: it's hard to keep track of all the moving parts and figure out which parts are working and which ones are not. You have to be able to look at the big picture without getting buried in details.
Otherwise, you'll lose track of progress toward benchmarks, waste valuable time tweaking things that aren't broken, or even just plain waste money on fluff (like advertising on Google Adwords) that doesn't bring you any measurable return.
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Filters | :: ADAM
A question that emerges often in discussions about marketing strategy is: "Is it fair to compare the results of a marketing strategy with the results of a marketing filter?"
Here's an example of a hypothetical situation. Let's assume that you have a business and you want to create a marketing filter for that business. You could look at the results from your existing Google Ads account, but you realize that those results aren't going to be helpful because they are based on AdWords ad targeting. You want the filter to bring in leads from LinkedIn and Facebook, and so you decide that it would be fair to only use data from these two networks in creating your marketing filter.
Once you create the filter, you don't want to take the results from LinkedIn and Facebook and stick them in a box to be analyzed later because it's difficult to compare those results with your overall marketing performance. You would like to create a model of how your business performs based on how your marketing is doing, but you don't want to discount it by making it the same as your Google Ads account. So, you decide that instead of putting all of your data into the filter and then running an analysis that compares the results from your LinkedIn connections (or some other segment) against other data like Google AdWords or page views, you'll use only a portion of it in building the filter.
Instead, you'll start gathering the data from LinkedIn and Facebook into a separate model. You'll compare the results from that filter against other data from Google Ads and website performance.
How is this different than creating a marketing filter? In creating a marketing strategy, you're basically saying that all of your marketing should be focused on bringing in more leads on LinkedIn and Facebook through all of your channels (including AdWords but also other places like guest posting or article marketing). You're setting up these channels to work in concert with each other so that they can be compared against each other when setting goals. If a particular channel is performing better (relative to other channels), you're going to feed that into a filter that is based on how other channels are performing. In contrast, in creating a marketing filter, you're saying that you want to use data from LinkedIn and Facebook as the key performance indicators for your company. You'll then run an analysis of the results of your marketing efforts compared against these metrics rather than going to the trouble of creating another model (based on Google AdWords data) and running another analysis.
How much change is this? In creating a marketing strategy, most of what you're doing really isn't different from what you'd be planning to do if you weren't using your marketing as a test bed for your model. The primary benefit of a strategy is how you use the results to improve your ads. You'd eventually have to settle on a model to run your ad campaigns, and you'd eventually have to run an analysis of the results (with or without LinkedIn and Facebook). The primary difference here is that your strategic analysis won't be aimed at improving AdWords. It'll be designed to understand the impact of all of your marketing activities compared against each other. In creating a marketing filter, you're going to do something different from what you would have done if you hadn't decided to create one. You will set up regular reporting into your model, but it probably won't be regular enough for most purposes. You'll also be using different metrics for evaluating the results of your marketing. While you may still be using the metrics from LinkedIn and Facebook to evaluate your overall performance, you'll need to keep some other measure for looking at how your marketing is doing.
With both strategies and filters, the resulting data is still just more data to feed into the model. The difference is in the way that you set up goals and define success. In creating a strategy, you're trying to find out if one channel is contributing more than others, while in creating a filter, you're trying to find out if this channel should be used at all compared against other channels (which are also being evaluated). For the most part, this is a question of trying to set up regular reporting of where you stand and how you can improve.
What's Missing? | :: ADAM
In " What's Missing? ," I complained about the tendency to look for something that is missing rather than focusing on what's there. This stems from the very basic attitude toward data in marketing, which is that it should lead us to action. If a marketing campaign isn't outperforming, then there must be something missing and we need to replace it with something else.
The reality is that marketing campaigns are rarely bad enough for marketers to stop doing them altogether, but they do often have holes or gaps. If you've ever tried to create a marketing plan and it was pretty much all fluff with no actionable steps, then you've seen how rapidly a campaign can go off the rails.
The marketing strategy is designed to fill in those gaps with specific actions that you need to take. The filter is designed to replace the gaps with data that says whether or not new steps should be taken. It's rare for marketers to have both a strategy and a filter.
Ideally, you wouldn't be using your marketing as an experiment for your output from the model. Ideally, you'd just tell your action plan what's going on and let the model decide whether or not it should clean up those gaps itself (i.e., fix itself).
Conclusion: The Closer You Get to the Edge, the Tougher it Becomes
If there's one thing that marketers know, it's that you can't ever be sure what data is going to mean in the end. As a rule, people try to make sure that they only use data when they've reached an extremely high degree of confidence. If you look at this as a simple matter of picking one piece of data over another, then most people are doing pretty well. However, if you start to think about how this relates back to every other piece of data, then things start getting interesting.