There was a time for brands when they needed to completely rely on creative ideas and that ‘one more campaign’ to get an edge over the competitor and stay relevant to the prospects. Traditional marketing has always been about activation and acquisition.
Modern-day marketing where we have broken the 4th wall with D2C (Direct to customer) business via. digital channel, just putting out the word doesn’t do enough. One can enter the jungle, but can they survive? can they be at the top of the food chain?
Scaling a business relies upon how we can push an idea to its full potential. How close we can get a marketing campaign to its ideal goal. But to make that happen, we need to look enough and look carefully at the work and its outcomes. Growth starts when the practice of optimizing the idea, effort, time, and resources is discovered. That is it, that’s the million-buck wisdom.
In my quest of discovering what’s on the next level in the art of marketing, I was itched by the underwhelming results of the campaign I use to run for a business that was running on a shoestring budget for a digital campaign, I realized about the missed opportunity for the campaigns I was running, exhausting the resources with mediocre results. I also realized that the importance of performance optimization resulting in an eventual growth phase.
Growth is when we start working on retention of an existing customer into a lifetime user. Furthermore, creating more users out of existing users.
After all the research and numerous failed experiments, I could gather from the available sources, I understood the effort are directed to growth when we scale the intended results with dynamic optimization.
The bandwidth of optimization starts and ends with a successfully executed customer journey keeping in mind success is subjective to the goal we are trying to achieve.
While planning the campaign, it is a wise step to run a trial that proofs the fundamentals of our campaign idea such as:
If it has the potential to increase the sale
What should be communicated
Which semantic end of communication are we getting more traction
and if we could identify the customer group for it.
As quoted by one of the experts I have been learning from,” As a Growth marketer, we figure out the right message, right offer, right customer experience for an individual customer.”
On a broader view we start to see the growth phase in 3 progressive parts:
Learning: Define Growth Model, Growth Channel, and Customer journey
Observing: Building Data, Roadmap, and Setting goals
Personalizing: Execute, Automate, and Scale
The growth model is the essential framework we choose for our business. It helps us set goals leading towards loyal, frequent, and habitual customers. The model then sets the pipeline for channels where we try a different experiment on the customer journey and scale it to maximum output.
Growth Marketing legend, Sean Ellis introduced a very thoughtful method for a marketer to validate their campaign with the ICE method i.e. Impact, Confidence, and Effort.
The impact is defined by effectiveness on a larger audience. Confidence is built by experience and historic data. The effort is measured by understanding the time and resources required.
Once we have our idea and plan defined, we move to quarter execution where we build, measure, learn the campaign cycle. Design experiment, execute, analyze and scale.
For example for a travel aggregator app, Quarter execution could be finding better retention of the customer using hypothesis testing between people who are trained to pay only when some discount is provided and those who pay full price which could help in understanding coupon-based purchase behavior.
And that’s the areal view of what are we in for when we escalate our campaign with critical analysis and optimization.
I would be writing about my understanding of the whole phenomenon and brush up on the anatomy of an optimized marketing campaign in 12 part series.
To begin with, We need to understand the one cardinal principle which is the soul of any campaign: The user-centric approach.
We already gain the attention of a customer when we click on the link which leads to our conversion platform. Most of the opportunity is lost when we fail to do something with the attention clearly and quickly.
To know our audience better, we should sort:
What is influencing them?
What question do they have?
What is the task they are trying to accomplish?
What are their pain points?
Upon these basic questions, we conduct our user research.
User research doesn’t always need to be on a fresh sample of an audience as we often miss out on the hidden wealth of data we already have with us within the organization. It could be any front-line person who gets to interact with the customer like sales, support, social media team.
Surveys are the best tool one can use to gather information but crafting a questionnaire that is short, clear, and absolute is an art. If done right, it can give cues to appropriate direction. But there is a flip side to surveys. It demands the attention of a user who rarely entertains a prompt to questionnaires. One of the most effective practices is to leverage incentives. Not every incentive needs to be monetary-based. It could be gift cards, digital giveaways, or a limited subscription to service.
To sum it up, Surveys should be:
Clear about the objective.
Deployed at the right time.
The reason should be provided for the conduct.
To sort the mixed bowl of questions for user research, we need to prioritize the tasks that are important to the customer.
The more important the task is to the customer, the less content is needed to produce for it. The less important the task is to the customer, the more content is to be produced for it.
A marketer should spend time with the customers twice every month which could help in refining the campaigns in many ways that are left out in the technical analysis.
A well-executed survey would move us to mapping customer journey and it’s very important to have an intense brainstorming session with the management, Users, and front line staff for it.
Testing is another important aspect of design and deployment as it helps us evade any waste of resources and time. Testing could be done on peer to peer basis or with the help of many effective tools available in the market. Testing should be done on every touchpoint of a customer journey likely from the survey to the conversion page using various hypotheses and conditions.
Once we get favorable insights from the tests, we can proceed with the launch and shift our focus to refinement.
We would need 2 tools for refinement post-launch: Analytics and Screen recordings.
Analytics helps us identify the traction for the campaign whereas screen recording tools such as heat map on the website could help us notice the drop-off points to work on.
Once we identify the drop-off points, we could work on amending them with various A/B testing.
A/B testing is the holy grail of running a campaign at an optimum level. It is trying different combinations of tactics at drop-off points.
So that sums up the User-centric approach for campaign optimization.
You could connect with me on my LinkedIn account: (https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthgrg/) to discuss all things marketing and share profound insights over how we can step up our game.
Cheers. :)
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