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The Content Problem: The Parable of Over-Saturation

I have an imaginary place in my head that allows me to understand everything in marketing very strategically. I'm going to be a little vulnerable and share it with you, today, in the context of content.

The more content brands create, the more competition rises, the lower probability you can make money from it. An entire profession based around content (journalism) is dying, what makes you think you can beat an entire industry? But every marketing function is trying to sell you on content (distribution, influencers, hubs). Today you'll learn about the problems with content strategy.

Meet the Market

Imagine a bustling ancient marketplace with 100 consumers and three shops (early SEO). People lined up to each and every vendor made money. Imagine more owners moving in, seeing other making money. The customers and vendors grow over a year and now you have 100 shops and 200 customers. The market has never been more popular, but most vendors can't make money. This is the approaching state of content.

Specialists work with the most popular shops (who pay), taking customers from the small shops and maneuvering them to the larger ones, they also draw more attention to the market, and get more customers. This is Facebook's strategy. However those who don't or can't pay see even greater loss.

Magical salesmen show up on the scene. They bring people who love them to the booth, only a few, but new customers. These wizards are showmen of the floor, vendor-taining more customers to your booth, but annoying others long-standers who just wanted a nice, quiet deal. This nets a positive until you see the wizard's bill. This is influencer strategy.

Another wizard appears from the ether, the risky wizard. He regales you of the time he helped Spiffy the Magnificent's business boom. You talk to Spiffy, it's true. You pay the wizard, and he performs a magnificent display for your shop...but everyone's saw that trick the last time. Yawn. It turns out that this wizard has a probability modifier, meaning he does sometimes succeed...freakin gloriously, but more often fails. This wasn't accounted for. This is the, "Big Idea"PR and Ad agency model.

Next comes the professional looking businessman who promises to make your shop more attractive and makes it easier to navigate. You do see improved results, but the cost of building your new shop takes decades to pay off with the improved performance. This leaves you financially vulnerable in the short term, reduces your flexibility to adapt (less funds), and the small-digit improvement doesn't look good to your performance in your boss' eye. This is content optimization.

Shady characters appear, selling vendors with promises of thousands of customers, more people naturally finding the shop, and various wonders of analytical performance. These are the people who run bot services, and promise SEO optimization that never delivers. By the time the check clears, they've already blamed the vendor for not listening and disappeared onto the next sucker.

Finally, a nerd with an abacus shows up at your door. He takes a tremendous amount of your money, but drives hordes of people to your doorstep. They're of a little lower quality but that's cool because you're making a net positive of sweet, sweet, monies. More people learn of this nerds services and he begins dividing his attention (and customers). You slowly notice less and less results until you are breaking even, and then eventually losing money. This is distribution, also known as paid media.

After you learn all these lessons, someone from another marketplace comes to you and says, "why did you do that? You could have learned from us?" This is journalism and it makes you cringe. Probably because you bought content from them. -_-

Aging Market = Less Revenue

The first people in the marketplace made their money when they were alone, and got out. Or became so big (Buzzfeed) they monopolized a huge part of the market audience through momentum. Because they made money early they could adapt more quickly and take over the market.

Everyone else just followed by example, assuming they had the formula. They discounted the marketplace economics of saturation. Eventually the market reaches and equilibrium. Those who can make money (with good margins) stay, but most walk away, disappointed. In economics this is known as the theory of the, "greater fool."

The cost of space went up as more people wanted in. The cost of wizards and con-men increased with more demand their services. The businessmen who optimized gave you a better product, but a shift in the market made it quickly irrelevant. Everyone took your money and got out. Welcome to marketing.

This process occurs on multiple levels. The product. Digital marketing. Niche things like Content. The list goes on. They are all going through one stage or another of this cycle. The best strategist can help you see beyond the hype, they try to show you the meta that is beyond, but it's a mountain of work. This is material that can't be taught in a jpg, or even a PowerPoint. It takes time, experience, long (boring, & ego-filled) discussions, and the wisdom of many failures.

How You Get Used

Others Take Advantage Beware the dark side. There are others who know the cycle, and use it! With the framework it's also very easy to sell you the hype. When all your friends have a shop in the slowly dying market, there are those who will sell you on it, too. The easiest thing to sell is that which is enviable.

The Enemy is Me Cognitively, we love the things we tell others to buy. Our brains are structured towards fallacy. They convince us that we are the heroes of our own story, regardless of the outcomes of our efforts. The more we invest in something, the more we convince ourselves it was worthy of investment. Break that cycle. Now.

The most important skill for you to develop is to train yourself to live in the (frankly, depressing) land of the meta. To invest early (and wisely) in new markets, and to dominate them, is both the smartest and most scary way to win. Or you're just spending the time convincing yourself you're not slowly being boiled, like a frog, with your competitors.

Ribbit.

Heh. Next time, we’ll talk about some tactics to navigate around a competitive market.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s to startups.

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5 Things I Learned From Spending Thousands on Instagram Ads

It's been a little over a month since Instagram started to roll out its Ad platform to the public. Since then we have all seen more ads in our feeds and if you’re like me, you've been wondering how well they work. Here are 5 major lessons I have learned.

Really useful!

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Mid-Funnel Ad Campaigns?

Time to make some money through nerdery and big budget campaigns. Ready?

Today you'll learn to graft a sequenced ad campaign to mid-funnel consumers. Ad campaign work is not just for the awareness portion of the funnel. Campaigns are actually most effective when integrated with the mid funnel. Your campaigns can and should be grafted to those qualified in CRM as leads. The campaign pays itself off by being, "always on" in a niche audience as opposed to a "short term burst" campaign seen at the top of the funnel.

If you want to learn about awareness sequencing, please refer to this article.

Why?

Through these integrations you can time box out the experience across all digital mediums. Social videos work in lockstep with display which launches email to the user at the same time. Because of sequencing you gain all the benefits of Ad sequencing, with the precision of CRM, and the impact of a major campaign. Daaaayum.

We built the nebulous notions of "campaigns" before the days of mid-funnel CRM. Hardliners only know top of funnel from experience so the technology and creative has never cross-pollenated until recently.

The problem with many campaigns is imprecision. Strategy is often built on nebulous user journey charts and intuition, without real analytical / social research, these works get scattershot to people who have low probability of conversion. They don't perform well.

You should be building campaign work that serves economies of scale (BOTH top and mid-funnel) and captures a high-value otaku consumer base through long-term sequencing.

The Process

Let's create a scenario. Jurassic Park, through its CRM & analytics systems have identified that users who research specific dinosaurs on their site are more likely to convert. Eureka.

Step one is a one-day project, a quick test. Through social engagement they confirm that dinosaur content is frequently engaged with, particularly the T-Rex.

Step two is the creation of a CRM flow. A flow is a sequenced set of actions, taken within a CRM system, to a specific set of users. Anyone who has submitted their email or logged in is cookied and tracked. Much like the dinosaurs.

Any mid-funnel user who has checked out a dinosaur page or opened a Dino-email would normally get more dinosaur emails, driving back to the site, but not this time. Instead of generic blah, a landing page, or bits of related content, Jurrassic Park amps it to 11.

Step three is using integrations through Lead Accelerator, Marketo, Facebook, and a few other sneaky tricks, users see Jimmy Fallon playing with little plastic dinosaurs across everything on week one. Week two is live video of our star digging through dinosaur poo in the style of dirty jobs. Week three? Famous YouTube celebrities begin talking about their Dino encounters. Finally on week four...oh look a free pass to see the T-Rex. No sale after week seven? Discounts.

The exciting nerdity: this isn't happening just through email. Users see it through the whole digital spectrum. It's not a national campaign (well, maybe it is at first to reduce costs but...), it's only seen by a select number of users. But here's the thing, it amortizes investment over time because this is the right content going to the right users, over time. Make money money, make money money money.

We've talked built a top-funnel sequencing campaign. We've explored Mid-funnel campaign work. Let's break the mold again next week with sales. ;)

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s to startups.

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The Coming Creative Renaissance

Two key developments could lead to a renaissance in creative thinking in the marketing world. 

The advent of VR in a successful light would reinvigorate the “traditional” creative forces of broadcast and immersive thinking. We also face a time where the left-brain technological landscape is beginning to even out in terms of ROI. Today you’ll learn why creativity could be making a comeback in a big way.

So what happened?

Traditional creativity never quite died, but it has been taking a beating as of late. The days of “Mad Men,” print, and broadcast, created a breed of creative elite who refused to change with the digital medium. The ability to quantify works and the fact that only one out of every thousand actually performed well caused a massive budget shift from creative “big” thinking to analytical, strategic, and UX-foundational thinking. Digital ate traditional.

Print died, Radio was reduced, and broadcast shifted from big agency thinking to a more mercenary-based project by project basis. PR, media, journalism, and advertising fight over who owns content, social media, and distribution. The dust never really settled, but everyone’s losing because of the chaos, including clients.

The Renaissance Will Be Broadcast

Ah, but it may turn out traditional has an opportunity to have advantage again in the war over brains and budget. The new VR products such as the Occulus Rift and the Hololens could bring about a revolution in the way we consume media. We talked about the stars that need to align for these new mediums to work, but if they do it means a heavy demand for video production and (more importantly) storytelling talent.

The nature of VR is that it is immersive. These devices bring you closer than ever before to a true experience. They blend interactivity with video and storytelling. You don’t need to watch a movie, for example because you will literally be in Hogwarts. This is just traditional media in a different form, that form is storytelling.

The people with the experience to capitalize on the new medium is actually the same group that fell to the shift to digital. It’s an amazing opening for a new era of, “Mad Men” level storytelling. While new age digital practices are amazing for accessing information, the are very poor in terms of creating an experience. Instead, we are on the potential brink of a blending of the two. If pulled off correctly, we will see a reinvigoration in the traditional medium.

Default to the Mean

In the field of statistics we have a term called regression to the mean. It means, in paraphrase, that multiple results will head towards the average, over time. Similarly in economics we say that over time an object finds it’s true value, it will find the price a consumer should truly pay for it. In digital, the more technologically advanced brands become, the more the market will find it’s true worth.

The closer to true worth a market gets, the more ripe it is for “big thinking” disruption.

You need to understand that digital has been in the place where the volume of users on digital was not equal to the amount of media budget spent on the medium. Brands found value because competition has been low. As other brands have learned there is gold in the hills, they all begin reallocating budget. In effect the market is mining itself out.

Eventually the market will saturate with people buying media. As this happens prices rise. As prices rise, less return on investment is found. That means marketers begin spending less because they do not find as much value. This is occurring on both the larger medium of “digital” and sub-platforms such as Facebook ads, native content, and programmatic media.

More marketers. Less space. Less Profit. A true-value budget. More disruption.

At the same time technology is becoming easier for everyone to get access to. Small companies can now easily integrate CRM systems, have access to complex retargeting methodologies, and have firm understanding of analytics. More access, more competitors, less value. More room for disruption.

Why more disruption? When everyone understands the same technology, and when everyone has access to it, no one has advantage over competitors. In other words you have to play in digital to compete, but you can never find a true competitive advantage. This is where disruptive marketing thrives.

The problem here is that you need creative people who also understand technology. To break something you must understand the landscape of it. Easier said than done.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s to startups.

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The Return of Broadcast : Quick Thought

If VR takes off with the launch of the occulus, video / broadcast content are going to take off again as the prevalent digital medium. Food for thought! #exciting

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Virality, Part One

When it comes to creating virality. No one cares about your brand. It’s not important. You aren’t a magical unicorn of creativity, you just have good connections, charisma, or PR people. Or you pay to be known. I’m looking at you, by the way, Draft Kings. Look, marketing is mostly a game and we are but the humble players, so today you’re going to learn the four key elements to actually creating something that’s viral.

Virality is the idea that for every hundred people who see something, a large % of them share it. A share is basically a free form of distribution and acts as a form of testimonial that the content being shared is actually worthy.

And no, viral is not a fake term. It’s just a numbers game, and not as easy as it sounds. Anyone who claims they can consistently generate viral results is generally trying to scam you. Virality is a discipline, not a surefire magical pill to branding success. It requires you to relinquish some control over your brand and what you want users to believe. In other words, it’s scary and hard to implement. Here’re the ingredients, which we will cover over the course of three works:

Part One:

A system to support the content.

A mind shift away from hardline branding.

Part Two:

A method to reach the right consumers.

Test, Refine, Improve Cycle.

Part Three:

Building for the Medium

Simplification

Content Systems

A content system can contain a number of really useful elements which make it easier for users to share. The ease of sharing is just as important as the content itself. The position of share buttons is absolutely essential and can improve sharing up to 32x. Users are…well not lazy… but need to be prompted with the correct elements at the correct time. The most important part of getting someone to share is asking them to.

The second part of a content system is redistribution. If someone enjoys a piece of your content, chances are they would be willing to see future pieces as well. Through elements like retargeting, you can ensure the correct type of people (Facebook) or those who spent a lot of time dedicated to the content (Google analytics + retargeting) are receiving more in the future. CRM systems are a big part of this as well, but not what we’re doing to go on about today.

The last vital part of a content system is analysis. Without analytics you can’t know how your content is performing.

Branding isn't Shareable?

Not quite. BUT it is counterintuitive to what you’re trying to do here. Viral content isn’t about your brand, it’s about the user. A user shares what they feel represents themselves. We share things to make people think we are smart, funny, or relate to a certain type of group. Someone who shares a scathing editorial on Donald Trump is actually trying to say they are politically savvy and have a strong opinion. You need to create content that aligns with who people want others to believe they are, not content that talks about the brand or product benefits.

Creative people talk about disruption in advertising, this is one piece. But to truly understand what works, you need to harken back to olden journalism times:

Timeliness shares are to let people know something important is going on. The user wants others to feel they are a source of important information. Proximity relates to the quality of how “close” (physically or not) a story is to a group of people. Impact is how much a story affects a person or group of people. Rarity deals with the weird or bizarre, something unique. Conflict shares are based around taking a stance or stating a strong belief in an issue, for example the famous “gay pride Oreo.” Prominence deals with celebrities: When Apple releases a new product or when a celebrity gets caught in a scandal.

The field of advertising adds disruption to the mix. Disruption is a form of rarity which deals with shocking people into attention with new experiences. Test and learn with content also introduces the brag — people like to show off pride based stories like having a baby, filling out a quiz, or going on a trip. The last is the niche, a form of story that gets shared when a user is part of a particular community.

What's not in the initial mix? The brand itself. If your goal is to create shareable content, then you need to make that first priority, then learn to later weave your brand more closely into it. It's possible but a difficult, limited, art form. You need to first build the discipline of shareable content into the organization.

But that's not always realistic. Organization need hard numbers. Harder sales and conversion KPIs should come from the systems like CRM or display after you provide meaningful, shareable content to the user. Virality is about building relationships first.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s to startups.

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Content Refines Audience

Why Ad Campaigns Hurt Organic Social Media

It’s a common misnomer that your should create content to grow your audience. Unless your content is groundbreaking, highly searchable, or “viral” you will typically never scale your audience to the size needed to justify the price of content production. Today you will learn instead how content refines your audience.

Post to social.

People Respond.

Those people are more likely to see future messages.

Others are less likely.

Therefore when you post new content types, it goes to a smaller subset of people who haven't been algorithmically adapted to it, or chose to follow you because of it.

Campaigns are built to be new. Therefore less effective than when you post the normal content types.

Take for example that this content will make it to advertising.tumblr.com. While this blog currently has 24,000 followers, the number doesn’t completely matter. If engagement or follower growth was the end result of writing this, I would not be writing a long-form editorial piece. In fact this is an opportunity cost versus the posting of simple gifs with funny captions which is organic to the platform. If your goal with content is engagement, you need to be taking a Buzzfeed-like approach of reaching the largest number of eyeballs.

Instead, I allow my content to refine my audience. I’m looking to elevate and provide content to a very niche type of people. Namely the people most likely to engage (and thus see more in the future) are those who would benefit from it. People who aren’t looking for that type of material will instead unfollow the page. In this way my content is actually refining my audience.

This is the intrinsic problem with brand campaigns and content shifts on social media. Social networks and paid media are built to reward those who have broad-appeal content. Large engagement numbers are indicators of high-quality content. Campaigns are inherently selfish.

If you run a particular type of content or tone for a length of time, you refine your audience to people who enjoy it. Introduction of new content types, a shift in brand tone, or running a campaign is now headed to the feeds of users who are refined down to a different style. Numbers plummet because these users don’t like your new content, an already smaller subset of your populace (refined from your original approach) are the only ones responding to your new content. You end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Content that Exemplifies Your Brand or Has Good Reach?

Because content defines audience, you need to decide if you are taking an approach which appeals to the largest number of consumers, but might be outside your brand voice, or making a tremendous sacrifice in scale to stubbornly insist on only talking to people who like your campaign work. Either way requires a sacrifice that only you can decide.

On the purely logical side, it’s less your job to go for one of these strategies and instead attempt to find a middle ground. This is usually very challenging, more so than adopting one social strategy or the other. The keys to the kingdom tend to be short, impactful, and represent something people feel is a reflection of them. If we want to be perceived as funny, our content or shares are humorous. If we want our brand to be seen as a thought leader, we write or share content that reflects intellect.

Your audience becomes a reflection of your content. Our brand’s content and messaging are the same. We create content that reflects how we want people to perceive us, and so that content refines down to the people who reflect those values. You job is to realize that if the audience isn’t receptive that it’s not their fault, your brand’s content isn’t responsive to the larger audience’s life goals. Just be careful who you say this to, many people get defensive when you tell them their approach to branding does not resonate with audiences, doesn’t lead to growth, and doesn’t nurture leads.

Yee gods.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s to startups.

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Built to Bend: Strategic Adaptability

In strategy we like to wax poetic about figuring out where to play in the market and how to win. But digital strategy requires an additional factor, adaptability. Today you will learn why it's important and how to build it into your thinking and pitch / recommendation process.

You hear a lot about the early game in chess (opening with the Queen's Gambit) and the end (seeing 6 moves ahead), but rarely in the mainstream do we hear about the middle. The pros know that the mid game is when things are really decided. The middle of the chess game is about positioning. You aren't really trying to overtly capture pieces, instead you attempt to maneuver your army into the best positions to react to any situation (usually the middle of the board).

Business strategists deal a lot with markets. Though markets change quickly, the digital front evolves even faster. A year ago we were not talking about automation as a real practiced discipline outside of sales. Five years ago social media was considered a fad. Ten years ago the internet was a joke in marketing. The pace of new marketing technologies is only increasing.

In addition to where to play and how to win, marketers need to incorporate into their strategy the idea of long term adaptability.

Strategic Adaptability in Digital Marketing

You can position a brand so that whatever happens in digital, you can pivot. The first method is acquisition. Acquiring users isn't just immediate gratification, it's a long term play. Three years ago having a user's email meant...well that you could email them. Now there are an innumerable number of places you can plug in an email address and reach users across the whole of the internet.

Acquired users can also be driven to new platforms. If a year from now someone usurps Facebook, you can drive your email list and Facebook followers to the new platform. Because they have expressed prior interest, they have a much higher intrinsic value than your average joe off the street. In terms of adaptation to the changing market, acquisition is a winner.

The other method of adaptability is trite, but true. Organizational culture is a thing, and it matters. Having a culture that isn't just ok with change but eager is absolutely necessary to combat digital marketing forces. Gone are the days of print ads and 30 second spots, but many organizations still monolithically cling to the notion of success through these mediums. An organizational culture of, "lean marketing" is absolutely essential. An army of employees willing to say, "Ok, that thing I was good at is gone, I'm going to learn this new discipline!" is the only thing that's going to keep you ahead of your competitors.

No successful digital project survives first contact with an old corporate culture.

In terms of pitching, this is a weakness of a lot of companies. They actuallyundervalue an idea because of it's benefits to long term adaptability. Agencies don't position their work this way and client-side managers don't sell it up the chain. However it's absolutely essential to the survivability of any industry that relies on digital sales.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s to startups.

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Why Marketers Lie

 Marketing is built to lie to you. Literally. It is of tremendous financial and strategic gain to mislead people into buying marketing snake oil. Today you learn why.

There are tactics and strategies that generate ROI in marketing, reliably, we just don't ever speak of them:

We don't talk about how integrating paid display with Atlas or first party data services actually improves return on your spend significantly. Instead we talk about our Spotify campaign.

We talk about influencers, but not the fact that they don't scale. The strategy works at first then degrades like lightning. Leaving you with costly production bills.

Tomes of newbie-friendly material have been published to the shelves  on how to write shareable content, ignoring that it's actually the mechanisms of the page that are what drastically increase shareability.

There is a tremendous ad media machine behind big campaigns that win awards (but not often revenue), yet you need to basically sell your email address to find one white paper that has powerful recommendations on ROI from mid-funnel integrations.

The list does, indeed, go on. Seth Godin was right the first time when he wrote that all marketers are liars. But there's logic behind it.

Lying for Competitive Advantage

Investment into production and integrations are stupidly expensive. There just aren't enough devs in the world and billable hours are nuts. Thanks mostly to the Internet, the business market now adapts extremely fast.

The more marketers that pile into a revenue-generating platform / idea the quicker it's no longer an advantage. The more consumer exposure to a new ad unit, the sooner they learn to ignore it. The more brands bidding for the same ad space, the more expensive it becomes. So, silence becomes a revenue-generating idea.

Brands don't ever talk about the ideas that really work. They would be idiots to.

Campaigns

So let's talk about campaign work. Campaigns usually don't work.

First, if they did, you wouldn't talk about it.

Second, media journalism don't have a rigorous data validation standard.

Third, media journalism is horribly biased.

Fourth, so are awards.

Fifth, most awards reward bravado and not standardized KPI results.

Lastly, award systems lag terribly behind what matters to the market.

But that's cool for some clients, internally and strategically:

Brands get free exposure out of it.

Brands managers can say their campaign was of value to their boards.

Awards make us feel good inside our neurotic-marketer minds.

Competitors say, "we need that too!" And, thrown off balance, try to duplicate it.

It is to everyone's strategic advantage to not only hide what works, but also praise what does not.

You Smecxy Thing, You.

Big campaigns sell. Big campaigns mean bigger budgets for marketing departments. Big campaigns mean you and the client get to meet famous people and take some days off the tedium to attend a shoot. Big productions mean big agency revenue.

Rigorous discipline doesn't sell. ROI generating opportunities usually mean you need to deal with internal politics. Building systems into your team means a lot of work over a never ending amount of time. ROI is not a one-off, it's a consistent pain in the butt.

Plus sales people for these B2B things are obvious and irritating. Ugh.

Have you ever tried to explain to a nebulous CEO a complex KPI or why you need a baffrillion dollars to implement Salesforce across your entire marketing pipeline? Shit's hard. Results take time.

Look! A campaign with mommy bloggers through, "native content." Ooooo, ahhh. Much easier and more sellable. Smecxy.

Do It Hard. Play it Loud. Light it Up. And Let it Burn.

Mmmmm, frightening honesty. Shit got real. What's the point? Education.

You can't navigate a problem unless you understand it. It's easy to knock a broken system, it's much cooler to acknowledge it and work to deliver real results. And you feel good inside.

Look, true knowledge in this industry doesn't come from publishers or thought gurus or even the press. It comes from blood, sweat, and tears.

Take it from someone who has lived on both sides of the fence. Do the hard stuff, learn what really works, suffer a lot, and your conscious and paycheck with thank you for the long term investment.

It turns out when most marketers are, "playing the game," those few who don't are strongest competitive advantage of all.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s at agency level to startups.

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Automate or Die

Today you'll learn about the importance of automated systems. Namely why, if you aren't developing them, you're going to get slowly eaten by competitors. Yeah, this is a scary one.

Sorry.

Automated systems are digital "things" that you set up that require no human intervention on a regular basis. You may, for example, go to a tropical island website and suddenly begin receiving email based on the specific pages you viewed, get special content in your social feeds, and see a lot more ads for the brand in the wild. If you don't purchase for a while you may begin receiving coupons. Automation.

"So why is that important."

Because your competitors probably are. In fact, automation is one of the most difficult things to detect. Some automation only occurs under certain conditions (season of the year, recency, time you spent on site, etc) meaning it offers your competitors a competitive advantage because it can't be traced. They are snagging your users who are shopping between brands by forming deeper relationships at a much earlier stage of development. Automate or die.

"But ok, beyond that, what's the big deal?"

Ok, I'm a gamer, so I'll put this into a game analogy. Stick with me for just one moment. In games, when you level up, you can sometimes chose between active and passive benefits. Active benefit might be your character can launch a new spell that looks shiny and badass. A passive benefit is less sexy but often times more powerful, “Your attacks deal 5 more damage.”

Automation is like a passive bonus. It makes every campaign and big marketing effort more efficient. Every. Single. One. Let’s think about this for a second. When you spend a lot for a risky awareness campaign you are basically making a high risk / high reward play. With passive, automated systems in place you are turning it into a medium risk / high reward play. In essence you are capturing more users down your purchase funnel who would not convert just off your campaign and landing page. The more marketing you do over time, the more value the automated system generates.

“Is it Worth it, Though?”

Yes. Basic automation is a few pixels on your website away. More complex automation involves the capturing of emails and lead nurturing. A step beyond that requires heavy API / developer intervention. The point is that automation is very flexible in terms of production cost. It feed off content as well but this is also flexible, ranging from a few images to full-scale content production teams. The more you spend on marketing each year, the more it’s worth to invest in automation (and early).

“How do I Get Started?”

For the basics, look into:

Facebook Retargeting Pixels (Display / Social Automation)

Mailchimp Automated Plan (Email Automation)

Adobe Creative Suite (Content Creation)

Get moving early.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s at agency level to startups.

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How Facebook Pavlovs Marketers Into Buying Ads

Facebook is the most efficient form of paid media. The combination of targeting and user time on site means every dollar spent has a higher probability of conversion vs other forms of media. Today you’ll learn how Facebook uses this advantage to train you, like Pavlov’s dog, to buy ads.

Pavlov’s Dog: How to Train People to Need Your Thing

In 1890’s a scientist by the name of Pavlov started feeding dogs and ringing a bell. Even without the food present, the sound of the bell brought positive response, and anticipation, from the dog. So Facebook has, of course, adopted it.

A Tale of Page Likes

When Facebook was new, it encouraged marketers to run ads to grow their page followers. Then, when that brand posted, the followers they had grown would see their content in their news feed. This seemed like a great business model until Facebook realized it wasn’t sustainable in the long term.Going back on its word, Facebook reduced the reach of branded content, meaning every dollar invested to get page likes was now worth less. Much less. Worse still, Facebook learned that instead of massive drops, it could reduce organic reach slowly over time. Like boiling a frog, marketers would never notice. Facebook burned an entire group of social managers who were hired on for organic content.

Manipulation 2.0

Facebook only has so many users and so many ads it can put in its feed. It gives preference to new types of ads. It makes them more affordable earlier so that they have high value. It can then decrease the amount of inventory assigned to that ad and raise prices over time.When Facebook wants marketers to start purchasing a new ad type, it will release studies. Early studies, such as those done with the recent Instagram ads, there are no competitors. Initial “test brands” get great results because they aren’t bidding against others for inventory and users aren’t used to ads yet (more susceptible).

These two factors mean that early adopters benefit most. But it is also a form of manipulation. The early studies and ROI from non-competitive ads generate hype, which moves competition into the space, which increases the cost of the ad. Eventually Facebook changes out the reach inventory, meaning you get fewer impressions for the old cost.

Facebook has literally trained an entire industry, Pavlov style, to expect reward when they purchase ad inventory.

Why It Doesn’t Matter

Facebook wins. Knowing how the game is played means you can get additional efficiencies of the system, but Facebook is still the best game in town. Because of targeting and the scale of users, Facebook is still the most efficient paid media game in town, you just can’t trust long-term investments with them.

Now they’ve saturated the advertising market and are now positioning to take over the journalism industry. Facebook is now the #1 source of reach for most major publications. It’s only a matter of time until that becomes more and more expensive to maintain.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s at agency level to startups.

[advertising-blog1]

Depth vs Complexity: A UX Model

Today you will learn a model of thinking which is universally applicable, from the field of User Experience. You can apply this to almost any product or marketing experience to make it more financially viable. It all starts with a game of chess.

Chess is a game of endless possibility. There is a board position for every grain of sand on the beach. Chess still engages us to this day because no two games are really the same. It allows the player to express his strategy across a fair and balanced field. All these combinations come from six types of pieces, six tools.

Chess is an incredible game because it is so simple. You only have a small set of tools to work with. Each of those specialized tools can be combined in endless ways. Chess isn’t complex though, it’s easy to grasp, but because of the possibilities it creates, it has wonderful depth.

One of the goals of UX is to create experiences which are simple, but much depth. Complexity is a very, very, bad thing. As much as we like to think ourselves brilliant searchers of the truth, our minds rebel again complex thoughts.

As an experiment in complexity, two stores were set up. The first offered 6 types of jam on the shelves. The second offered 30. The first saw a 31% conversion rate among shoppers. The second? 4%.

Even though consumers presumably shop at this particular store in part because of the large number of selections available, having "too much" choice seems nonetheless to have hampered their later motivation to buy.

But how does this apply to digital products and marketing?

One search box (simplicity) is a tool for endless possibility. You can find anything (depth). 

Another example: the Facebook algorithm organizes content based on recency, popularity, and relationships. Without this algorithm, Facebook wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is. Instead of searching through your friends profiles, Facebook elevates what works. It takes all the complexity and makes the server do the work.

Complexity Kills Efficiency.

Every project you work on should contain a clear UX exercise: What can we take out? What’s wasting development time and consumer interest. In the end, digital is about presenting a small amount of amazing information (simple) instead of offering endless amounts of information of varying quality.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s at agency level to startups.

[advertising-blog1]

Analytics for Liars

Today you’ll learn the importance of doing your own analysis. You’ll learn that analysts are often just storytellers. And you’ll learn some of the tricks of the trade. When you are paying for results, make sure you’re getting results. In this day and age it’s frighteningly easy to be lied to about the performance of a project. Welcome, class, to Analytics for Liars.

The Lead Gen Campaign Grew Our List by 100%

Never trust a percentage. Percentages are nice to look at for comparison, but also an amazing tool to distort data. You’re told your thousands of dollars of media has doubled the size of your mailing list. That’s great. Congrats. Until you remember that you’re mailing list had only 50 people. Doh.

Our Campaigns Work Great! Look at this Chart!

Oh, good, the numbers do look up. Until you remember that these campaigns have been running for years...

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Our Campaign Got You 1,000 Twitter Followers for $10.

It’s a general analytical rule that the quality of a lead or source decreases with each dollar spent. Turns out the people who are most eager for your product convert first. So a lead after a million dollar campaign isn’t of the power of one at the onset of marketing.Additionally, it’s very easy to purchase leads from either spambot communities or from third world countries with no intention of conversion. You can get a CPC of $.02 in Brazil vs $2.00 in America-which sounds better to a client that doesn’t do their own analysis?

Cut Your Own Data

Seriously though, modern analysts aren’t just taught how to crunch the data. It is a very active academic practice to teach math nerds how to present the data. There is not a single person reading this who has never been pressured to make a project sound good after the fact; it’s both business and human nature. What if you were the only one who knew how to crunch the numbers? So easy.

In the realm of marketing, few things actually work. It’s a horrifying shell game many play to see if they can avoid getting asked too many in depth analytical questions. Many ideas even sound amazing until you have a firm mind for analytics.

Yelp for example has an interesting model. Yelp charges you to appear on your competitors’ Yelp results. Except this ad only drives users to your Yelp page. A Yelp page doesn’t have conversion forms. Your users have to go through an extra page to actually purchase your product. At every conversion point, you lose a large number of users. Meaning Yelp is actually costing you a ton of conversions vs a Facebook ad. Without a grasp on data and analysis, you could easily buy into products which logically have a low probability of conversion.

We’ve looked at four ways to lie - through percentages, charts, relationships, and obfuscation. There are literally hundreds more. Do yourself and your company a favor, learn to crunch the numbers.

Jim Bruno is a Director of Marketing and Digital Strategist. He’s worked on everything from Fortune 500s at agency level to startups.

[advertising-blog1]

Marketing: Why Your Cool Product Fails

You create a cool product. It solves a real user problem. It’s well priced. You’re going to make millions. You launch your site. And...nothing happens. Today we learn why your thing usually fails.

So we’ll assume you didn’t create something hype that doesn’t matter. Because we really can’t help you there. If you’ve really made something amazing, you haven’t distributed it enough. “You pay for it and you’re stuck with it forever. Good products should just sell themselves. Paid media is a drug!” No.

If the thing you made gets people who see it to give you money, why wouldn’t you show it to more people at a fast rate? If your product is viral, every person who sees it has a high probability of sharing it, giving you even more organic reach at a faster pace. Paid distribution is a multiplier, not something that makes your product somehow worse.

If your awesome product or experience fails, it’s likely because you did not scale it. If it can’t, it’s probably not an awesome product.

More efficient targeting or better CPI at same audience quality can make that ROI more likely, but it’s really hard to outperform Facebook or Adwords when you’re a new product that hasn’t saturated the market. These are not complex media products, they take maybe a day or two to learn to do what you need, and a few weeks to test.

The Economics of Why You Fail

Ok. We’re going to walk through the financial logic of why this is true. No, no, wait, please don’t run. This isn’t calculus class. Let’s talk amortization.

Amortization is the principle of paying off a debt over a period of time. Media is the marketing tool to amortize the production of the cool thing you made. Huh?

Let’s pretend you make a cool thing. It costs you $1,000 to make in time an resources. It costs $10, and one person sees it per month. Everyone who sees it, loves it, and you make $10. You make your money back in 100 months through people organically finding your thing.

Except that’s not how the market works. Someone else will learn about your cool thing, and make one...except they will use paid media. Their production cost will be $1,000, it will cost $10. Except they will pay $1 per user to see it. Suddenly they are making $10 for every dollar they spend (for a while) and pay off their production cost in hours. They capture the market and it’s suddenly their thing. With the market eaten up, the number of people who see your product dries up drastically, you not longer make money. This is why your product fails.

Worse still is creating a product in a saturated market. This is when you create a product in an environment that has a ton of similar product. You create into your own disadvantage. This is also why most products fail, the product is great but the market is already full. Without substantial effort, a huge budget, and an amazingly differentiated product, you can never break into a market. You fail.

Distribution of product through paid media is epic amounts of important.

Before you create a new product, ask yourself if you are you amortizing your production cost and what does the market look like.

[advertising-blog1]

How To: Layer Content Over User Journey

Today you will learn how to build product-oriented content over the user journey. You will Learn how to valuate the creation of content against user utility and determine the best lanes to begin creation.

Journey Layering: An Introduction

It should be stressed that there are many forms of content strategy, a product-centric approach is the simplest but also most valuable introductory framework. To start we need to break apart the layers of a product. Let us say we work for the marketing department of Toyota, attempting to sell their SUV, the 4Runner.

We first create layers of content around the product. At the center is the conversion point, this is usually a web commerce solution or form. Next is interest in the product itself and research around it. Above that is the product category, in this case users who are actively considering an SUV. Last are those who are or will soon be in the market for a new vehicle.

If you look in the United States, there are many people who would be interested in a car. A smaller subset would be interested in an SUV. Of that group an even smaller number would be interested in the product benefits / differentiators of the 4Runner. Of that group an even smaller subset would bite the bullet and make the financial commitment.

Corporations come up with more elaborate ways of saying it, but a consumer who buys a 4Runner will generally first decide they need new wheels. They then decide they need an SUV. After research they narrow down competitors, then they might purchase. This is a basic user consideration cycle. So let’s say we want to create content that supports the journey...to nurture our leads.

Conversion Content

Users in the center have the most value. They are only one step away from conversion. They have moved past all other mental obstacles and are ready to make a purchase. They usually only need a reason to bite the bullet. Per dollar spent, focus on these high-quality leads will yield the most revenue. The problem isn’t quality at this layer, it’s scale.

As mentioned before, the number of people who will usually buy your product is actually a very small subset of a much larger number of people shopping within a category of offerings. This smaller scale means that you can exhaust your audience much faster and with less spend, because they are already to purchase.

This group needs a push or truly in depth content. Coupons, sales, and offers of Q&As with professional staff all help tip the scales. Content includes product-oriented messaging that eases customer pain-points such as financing and, on the creative side, future positive visions of what the product will do for them.

Due to the small size, the laws of diminishing returns are much harsher at this level. Costs increase and can spiral out of control quickly in terms of attempting to convert a smaller group.

Competitive Content

One of these things is not like the others.

This is content which emphasizes your product differentiation. Users at this stage of the journey know they want an SUV but don’t know which one. Differentiators resonate with the audience, solving real problems competitors seem to have neglected. Content on this level is an exercise in product benefits. On the creative side of content, this is also where you see many of the fear-based articles such as, “Double Antilock Breaks Double the Chances of Surviving an Accident.”

The goal here is less to sell direct sales (BUY BUY BUY) and more to convince the audience that your product has the right feature for their daily lives.

Product or Category Content

This layer represents your users who have not yet committed to interest in your category, but are highly qualified for conversion to it. While previous layers deal with users who are on a stage of their journey that makes them sales qualified leads, we now enter into the realm of marketing qualified leads.

It is a vast an unfortunate mistake that users you get from the wild will respond to hard-sales messages or self-centered product messaging. It makes sense that a large set of the audience isn’t ready for that level of commitment. Product or Category content is built to ensure your customers know that the genre of product will fix their problems.

The strategic types of content on this level are pieces that explain the genre and benefits. This is also usually the level where you can begin getting targeting options through distribution platforms. On the creative side, this is ripe for whitepapers, reports, and guides. Less heavy content include videos and categorical benefits.

Mass Benefits of the Category

It is at this point where your leads will typically end up not converting well and you get a lot of inefficient spend. This is the last place to start playing / developing. If you aren’t in a, “Blue Ocean” product category, your competition will begin saturating the inner layers with content. More competitors means you need to get customers earlier in the cycle, which means less efficiency.

This is the point where creative campaigns for awareness and general appeal tend to take shape. The overall goal is usually capture of an email address into a system or a visiting of a particular conversion page. There are many people who want a car, but few who will end up wanting your particular SUV.

Fluff

It is after that where you’re going after the mass market. Content on this layer is usually built to pique interest in the product or category, not to specifically get someone to convert.

What to Build

Start at the center, work your way out.

Start at your website. People who visit are much more likely to convert than people randomly obtained through ads and landing pages. These users have already shown high interest by visiting and are the best to send content. Work your way out from their and mind the competitors.How do you qualify who should be receiving what content? We’ll talk

Jim Bruno is a marketing director, a digital strategist, and a nerd.

[advertising-blog1]

Custom Audiences = $

In this piece, you will learn what a custom audience is as well as its benefits and downfalls. You will explore some of the current offerings in the market and set a few points of differentiation. Lastly, you will learn the key technologies and techniques for employing this offering.

Custom Audience

Custom Audiences, also known as distribution tailoring, is the ability to target a series of emails in paid media. For example you could take your mailing list and be paying to show only that set of users your ads.

The efficiency of the offering relies on two distinct principles, probability of interest and the pareto principle. Probability of interest says that if someone has interacted with your brand in the past, then they are statistically more likely to interact with it in the future. The Pareto principle states that most of your revenue will usually come from a small core of customers, repeat buyers.

In other words if you have someone’s email then those users are statistically more likely to buy from you because they’ve already expressed interest. If most (80%) of your revenue comes from a small core audience, then nurturing and developing them through content, ads, and offers will yield the most results per dollar spent.These ideas combined mean that targeting your mailing list is:

Very cheap. Because you know these user will click.

Very effective because you know these users will buy.

Therefore custom audiences are (unless you are buying a mailing list) very cost effective lead nurturing programs.

Who Offers These Ads?

The only platforms that can offer the ad-buying service are those who already have users emails—most of the social networks and Google.

Adwords Customer Match Customer Match is the newest contender in the space. Because fewer marketers have adapted to it, it’s actually very cost effective right now. Early studies show it is the most effective of the services. This allows you to distribute your ads to your email list across many of Google’s offerings and expand your targeting to similar audiences across Youtube and Gmail.

Facebook Custom Audiences The “traditional” offering now. This allows you to target any ad type against a custom email list. Facebook has the most personal user information and the most diverse number of ad offerings, giving you the most flexibility in what you want to do with your audience and the KPIs (metrics) you set against them. Facebook also has display / mobile offerings to expand beyond the immediate network.

LinkedIn Lead Accelerator We’ve talked about this one before. Through Marketo (a CRM solution), you can integrate your list with LinkedIn. LinkedIn has benefits in terms of lead generation, but is still largely untested in terms of nurturing your leads. The main benefit is more reach, integrating all these systems mean you are going to nearly every site or network people are playing on. Additionally this is probably the best audience tailoring solution for B2B, which essentially lives on LinkedIn.

Twitter...whatever Focus on other things first. Round your way over to this last. In fact, focus on other projects first.

Limitations

Yeah. So here’s the thing, you are limited by your email list, product type, and diminishing returns. Your email list is only so large. Of that email list, many contacts may be fake emails (especially if you run a lot of contests). The list may be diluted or segmented based on how you acquired your users.

You may have a product that people only buy once, like education. In which case, this limits the actual utility of the offering. If you don’t have any pareto customers, the most lucrative part of targeting these users drops off. There’s still lead nurturing for new customers, but it’s a less attractive marketing tactic for you.

There’s also the force of diminishing returns. Each dollar you spend on a particular audience is generally less powerful than the last. If someone has seen your ad four times already, they are almost never going to covert after that, or do so at a much higher cost to the marketer. Custom audiences follow the same laws of diminishing returns as any audience. However it’s limited to your list, unless your list is huge you can’t spend a lot on media without burning money or creating very diverse content types.

A few notes of difference:

They are worth more, so you can spend more reacquiring them.

They are cheaper before they diminish because they already know / like your product.

The list site + amount of content you generate defines ad spend.

In many ways, custom audiences have their limitations.

Related Technologies

The obvious one is lead nurturing / CRM. You can take your lead segments, feed them into these tools, and nurture them to the next stage of their development. Normally this would only happen through email—now you can nurture leads through social, display, and video, getting them to the next stage of the buying decision.

Paid media becomes more efficient. And confusing. Assuming from last year, you would be both making more money and generating fewer leads. This means your media team looks better in the short term, but worse in the long term. You need to build out separate budgets and reporting metrics to avoid clouding the data.

Content gains tremendous benefits. Cheaper CPC to your content means more relevant eyeballs are hitting new content. This also means your bounce rate goes down and your conversions go up. Spiking a custom audience program to content can also cloud the data, but to positive benefit.

Conclusion

Your ads are now part of your lead nurturing / CRM strategy. Your metrics are going to get more cloudy. You’re going to make more money if you do it right. Congrats...and I’m sorry.

Jim Bruno is a marketing director, a digital strategist, and a nerd.