A day of marketing challenges

campaign, Marketing, single target market

Today was a very dense day in terms of doing some massive amount of brainwork. Generally my day is full of a lot of transactions which eat up my brain power. Today however was majorly about thinking through a couple of market related problems.

In one situation we had to sit down and physically analyse the database, because there was no response from the database to a campaign we sent. In any campaign, if there’s a problem with the response, then the first thing I like to look at is the database. So after testing multiple messaging when we didn’t get a response, we had to sit down to figure out the challenges with the database. So we went down the list of companies with a comb to figure out what could be the challenge. This was pretty time consuming as well as mentally exhausting.

In the second case, it is still work in progress, I had to analyse on figuring out a single target market for one of the service areas that we deal in. Figuring out a single target market is time consuming because you have to start with the whole market and then keep stripping down. However in this process, you don’t want to miss out on any portion of the market to analyse. So you try to analyse the market from the attributes perspective first, then usage perspective, to ensure that you are not missing out on a lucrative market.

After that you have to see if the market has a decent size for you to operate in. While you have niched down to such a specific market that has only say 100 participants, then the chance of you being able to convert a substantial number is limited. Having said that, this quantity is a relative thing. If you are selling airplanes like a Boeing or Airbus, in any country you may not have more than a handful of airlines. But because the ticket size is so huge that even those handful is a big market.

I shared how in a typical day we analyse the marketing issues. I will look forward to your comments on how you analyse marketing related problems.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

What is the JOB that you want your campaign to do – 2

campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media

This topic was not supposed to be split into 2 posts but it so happened that today morning I was watching a YouTube recording of the ILoveMarketing Meetup Group where Dean Jackson was interviewing Paul Colligan on the topic of podcasting. For those who have not read my post yesterday – I was referring to the Clayton Christensen experiment where he talks about the JOB of a McDonald milkshake. I had used that analogy to talk about why this question is important when you are choosing media instead of blindly following others.

He made a statement similar to what I had made when I was discussing with the media company regarding people blindly choosing Instagram because they get followers faster. Paul narrated a story where he asked a prospect about what was the objective of the podcast that he was trying to make and the prospect said “downloads”. So Paul asked him if downloads from China do or if they were to come from Fiverr – would they meet the objective? Clearly the prospect got the message.

Since there’s so much hype about followers / downloads most people think the objective is to create followers or to get downloads. You need to have clarity on what is the JOB you want your campaign to do. Not multiple jobs. Just one job.

If you are going on any platform – not only social media -for business purposes, there has to be a clearly defined JOB that you want the platform to achieve. Then understand if that platform will meet the objective in the most cost effective way. This is important because you don’t have unlimited supply of funds – even if you have, it would be stupid to get an email address at $10, if there was a way to get it at $1.50.

Don’t get muddled in your thinking based on the hype of the media companies. Its their JOB to sell you on the positives of their medium, but its your JOB to determine, what’s best for you.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

What’s the JOB that you want your campaign to do

campaign, ideal customer, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, media

A few months back I had written a post on the Clayton Christensen experiment on What’s the job of a McDonald’s milkshake. That’s a very pertinent question for everything that you do in marketing. If you’d like, you can go on YouTube and search for the video, on this experiment.

Every email you make, every campaign you run, every media that you choose should have a very clearly defined job description. If you mess up over here all your decisions will be muddled and you won’t get your results.

I was discussing yesterday with a media company on the relative merits of YouTube, Instagram etc. One thing which came out during the discussion was that people choose Instagram over YouTube for running campaigns because they can generate followers faster.

Which got me thinking. Is the objective of choosing a platform only to increase followers which then led me to the base question again of what’s the job you want your video campaign or any other marketing activity to do.

Blindly creating followers should not be the job. The job in my opinion, if I was the advisor to a company would be to say – create followers of a specific kind with certain characteristics defined, which should eventually get converted leads and subsequently business.

If your campaigns on Instagram can achieve this objective, then its the right medium, if not , you need to figure out a different medium. That comes back to my favorite term, Testing. So even though all your planning suggests a given medium, based on the clearly defined job, only testing should clearly confirm it.

Let the market decide during the test about what is the right thing. Once you get your test results then go the whole hog to get business.

Most social media platforms will have a lot audience including yours. The next stage of your testing should include how you can get your ideal customer at the lowest possible price. The economics will decide your staying power . At the end of the day your marketing stamina will decide the winner in the long run.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Don’t blame the message…..check your market first

B2B, campaign, ideal customer, Marketing, messaging, single target market

I recently had two failures on a set of email campaigns that we ran for our B2B audience. As usual the first input I got from he sales team and their managers was “not a single response”. I was tied up in some other activities before I could analyse the issues. So last week I sat down with my team and asked them to come on Zoom so that I could see exactly what’s going on.

Whenever you talk about campaign failures – the first place that I like to check is the database (Also called the audience or in abrader term the market) in case of B2B prospects.

So if you try to sell carpet cleaning, you should be sure that the audience you are talking to has deployed carpets in their homes. Otherwise you can do the best advertising, messaging, offers but you won’t get an enquiry.

in my understanding when you have to do a post mortem of an advertising or email campaign failure, first start with the database because more than 50% of the times, that is the primary cause.

To come back to my story, I started going account by account for one campaign and realised that we were sending mails to the said designations of people, but the size of the companies was way higher than what I had mentioned in the Ideal Customer Profile. Somewhere there was a mis-communication between the manager and the database resource and we had this issue.

In the second case, the broad industry, revenue etc. were all matching. We didn’t have the break down of the sub industries. Before starting the campaigns, I had asked the research guy to give a sub-industry breakup also so that we are sure of the audience to whom we are sending. Since sales guys have their own time pressures, they decided to overrule me and the campaigns were sent out. Again “not a single response”. So during this session I decided to go to each company in the database and I asked the sales guy to show me the company details on Linkedin. Soon it was apparent that the sub-industries in which our service is not applicable were predominant in the database.

Whenever you want to analyse the failure of a campaign start with the Market/database first – you may not need to go any further after that.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!