Advance warning: to some extent this is a follow on from last week’s blog. File under ‘flogging a dead horse’ if you wish to do so, but I think this adjacent topic deserves a short piece of its own.
That topic is focus. Specifically, I want to talk about focus when it comes to marketing spend on advertising (online or offline, it’s all the same really) and how ego or just good old-fashioned ignorance can get in the way of our friend return on investment.
I’m a firm believer in de-mystifying pretty much any subject. And that most certainly applies to marketing.
Unfortunately, a good number of my peers don’t seem to share my enthusiasm, possibly because once you remove the jargon and obfuscatory language good marketing practice starts to look and sound an awful lot like ‘common sense’. Or in other words, anyone can do it.
(Both those things are true, by the way. It is common sense and yes, anyone can do it).
So let’s demystify digital advertising. It is an auction for attention. That’s it.
It’s worth remembering a couple of things about auctions. The first is that nobody gets a bargain. You are going to end up paying the going rate, because there’s always someone else pushing the price up to its natural equilibrium*.
The second, and this is something of a digression, is that the only way to get around this is to attend auctions where nobody else turns up. That is why smart online advertisers are always looking for new, emerging channels rather than old favourites. I remember taking advantage of this previously in the early days of LinkedIn advertising, but the principle still holds (even if it doesn’t apply to LinkedIn anymore).
Why focus matters
What, you may well be asking, does all this have to do with the importance of focus? Good question. To which the answer is: if I am going to bid in an auction for somebody’s attention, I am going to make absolutely sure I am buying the right somebody’s attention.
That is what focus in marketing spend means.
At this point, I might fairly be accused of stating the obvious. And I would accept the charge, if I didn’t see marketing teams constantly spend time and money talking to people who will never, in any circumstances, buy their product or service, or influence a purchasing decision.
In most cases, our old friend ego is at fault. Don’t we want the world to know all about our product!? Isn’t a billboard on highway 101 just the BEST idea! To which it is the regrettable responsibility of the CMO to say “no, we want the people who might buy our product to know about our product” (just say nothing about the billboard and hope it goes away).
I’ve written about Account-Based Marketing before, so I won’t repeat myself other than to say that the real power of ABM is that it gives us what we’ve always wanted - the ability to target our communications reasonably accurately at the people we need to get in front of. That is ultimately why it is exciting (if you are the sort of person capable of getting excited about marketing tech).
But even outside of ABM, good, common sense practice can get us most of the way there in terms of spending money in the right places (and only in the right places).
Here’s three things to embed into your marketing process that should in turn help you maintain focus.
First, ask yourself what the absolute simplest way to talk to someone would be, and then do it. A simple way to talk to someone is to pick up the phone, or send an email, or write a letter. How old-fashioned! But if you have a relatively small target audience and you can name them, it’s probably going to be more effective than some souped-up Saas marketing ‘platform’.
This is invisible marketing. People hate it, because it feels like hard work and your peers don’t even see it. It is a crying shame that it works.
Second (if you have to go down the digital marketing route) evaluate the audience any given campaign in any given channel will give you, and do that for yourself and with your own specific needs in mind. Document it, so you can compare it with other alternatives.
Remember that there are (broadly) two attributes to a great audience:
Relevance: are they the right people, and
Intent: are they buying (or at least looking) now
Your ideal audience will index highly against both these attributes. There are a variety of ways to help make this happen, which I’ll save for another blog post one of these days.
Third, remember to evaluate your campaigns based on metrics that really matter to your business. A thing that matters to my business is closed deals. If we wanted to be a little fairer to the marketing team we might allow evaluation based on new opportunities created, or even sales-accepted leads. It’s not our fault if the sales department would have trouble closing a door after all.
What we certainly wouldn’t evaluate with is raw inbound leads. That number tells us almost nothing about the quality of audience we are targeting with a campaign, because the suitability and intent of raw leads has not yet been measured. We just won’t know how well or poorly focused our campaign is.
There’s a lot more to be said about attribution and the sales funnel that will have to wait for another day. Until then - remember to focus!
*Or beyond. Irrational decisions abound in marketing - don’t let someone else’s determine your strategy.
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