Making Marketing Strategy Easier

Rob Ousbey
Making Marketing Strategy Easier
#SIC2015

The Creative
To begin, I want to share the story of a creative
campaign we launched on behalf of a client.
NB: I’ve added these grey boxes to
the online version, to give some
narrative to these slides!

The Coverage
We earned coverage from practically every blog and
news website we could have hoped for.

The Results
1,100
21,000
15,000
15,000
3,000
And the piece continues to earn links: an average of
four new linking domains every day of the week.
Linking Root Domains
Facebook Likes
Facebook Shares
Twitter Tweets
LinkedIn Shares

The Client’s Reaction
Not long after, the client fired us. In the short time
we’d worked together, we hadn’t moved the right
needles for them, and we’d not show how our work
was going to actually benefit the brand on the time
scale that was in our heads.

The Only Ways We Fail
We failed to do
the things we
set out to do.
We achieved the
things we wanted to,
but they didn’t have
the anticipated effect.
As a consulting agency, we get to post-mortem,
debug and try again. I’ve outlined two failures modes
here: execution failures, and strategic failures – this
presentation focuses on avoiding the second type.

What is ‘Strategy’?
Objectives
What do we want
to achieve?
Tactics
The things we’ll
do to get there.
Strategy
How can we
achieve it?
Specifically, we’re talking about the part of the
process that turns ‘what we want to achieve’ into
‘what to do to get there’.

Objectives
What do we want
to achieve?
Tactics
The things we’ll
do to get there.
Strategy
How can we
achieve it?

Objectives
What do we want
to achieve?
Tactics
The things we’ll
do to get there.
Strategy
How can we
achieve it?
If a strategy is set well, then it allows you to look at
any part of your to-do list, and ask ‘why?’ all the back
up to the top level goals.

Matryoshka Strategy
The overall ‘business objective’ may generate tactics for individual teams (such as logistics, finance, sales,
marketing, etc.) That then sets an objective for each team, who develop their own strategy and tactics.
If the marketing strategy suggests investing in PPC, social and email marketing, then each of those
departments will now have an objective, and can start their own process.
This presentation focusses on the marketing portion – turning marketing objectives into tactics.

Why do we need another framework?
Many other strategy frameworks exist, but there are
always parts that I find lacking, particularly given the
way the internet has changed the options available
to us, and made new data available.
But mostly I wanted a process that we could go
through very quickly, and get an answer we were
90% confident about in 1/10th the time it could take
us.
This is incomplete, consider it a working draft. I've
been field testing this with clients over the last few
months, so now I get to share it with you.

Getting Things Done
‘Doing strategy’ often seems particularly time
consuming, and it sometimes seems to be a
wonderful way to ever get real work done.
If you have people who can get on with executing;
give them your best guess of things to do while
you’re researching/planning - and treat it as a test to
see what happens.
I'm also OK with tactics influencing strategy. If you
have a tactic that you’ve found is working well; then
look for insights. That can contribute to the process.

Before we get started: if you find this framework useful, please
click here to share
with your friends and colleagues on Twitter.
For more like this, follow me here:
@RobOusbey

Be Selective
You can’t be all things to all people. There’s a well
understood process of ‘persona identification’

Prioritize
Beyond identifying a number of persona, you should
prioritize them – and understand which groups
you’re not going to target.

Gender
Education
Location (geographic, rural/urban)
Age
Situational (marriage, kids, studying, working)
Behavioural
Their location & language
Interests
Values (internal beliefs that influence a purchase decision)
External influences
Also: Business or personal purchase? Many companies offer service to people who are buying
B2B as well as B2C. Consider the audience for companies like Staples, Dropbox or Hilton.
Factors we may want to describe in the persona:
Things that change
quite rarely
Things that change
more often

Guesswork & Gut is Rarely Enough
It’s tempting to take a guess at the personas for your
business, but we can do better that.

51% of people believe it is important
that brands ask about their needs.
10% of people said that their favorite
brands do this well.
You Have Permission to Ask
Edelman surveyed 11,000 people across 212 brands
in 12 market sectors. The results showed that people
really don’t mind brands asking about their needs!

Survey Process
We run surveys by emailing a segment of existing
customers, with various questions to answer.

Beyond basic demographic data, you can find out a
lot about the customers’ values and interests.

Interviews
We then group the data by similar responses and
pick representative people from each major group to
speak to for longer. This gives us the chance to look
for recurring themes, and even particular quotes that
we can incorporate into a persona.
Although it’s more geared toward product
development, the ethos of the questions in Zac
Cohn’s deck are well worth considering.

Scaling with Existing Data
But it’s 2015! There’s enough data available to us that
we should be able to generate some insights before
we have to turn to surveying/interviewing people.
The place to begin is any interesting data submitted
by customers. For example: college recruitment
marketers can review application essays (perhaps
just for accepted students) to get insights.

Existing Data Sources: User Data
bart@fullcontact.com
The FullContact API will take an email and return
age, gender, location and lots of other demographic
stuff, all for around 1cent per result. It also gets:
location, their employer, and tries to find their
interests (based on an aggregation of lots of data)
Consider running this over all your customer records
(or just those in a certain segment, such as the top
20% of customers by revenue) to find out who they
really are.

You don’t even need a developer – you can do all
this at scale in a spreadsheet!

social media – digital marketing –
digital media – creative director – real estate – graphic designer – pacific
northwest – marketing manager – online marketing – media marketing – marketing agency – digital
marketer – graphic design – husband father – dog lover – web developer – business development –
pop culture –user experience – washington state – public relations – marketing professional –
content marketing – world traveler – web design – music lover
Followerwonk (a Moz tool) can parse all of your
Twitter followers, and review their bios to find
common themes.

Twitter Analytics can analyze your audience, and
compare it to a benchmark population.

Google Analytics gives affinity/in-market data for
your visitors. You could filter this data by converting
users or basket sizes. It can also be used for creating
custom reports which can be analyzed or used later
for retargeting.

Overlooked Personae
Don’t overlook a couple of interesting groups: people
who already know & feel positively about your brand
(but need activating), and previous customers that
haven’t purchased in a while (and need reactivating.)

Third Party Data Surveys
You can run brand awareness/affinity/association
surveys using AYTM, Google Consumer Surveys or
SurveyMonkey Audience.

Third Party Data Surveys
For example: 70% of mothers with young children
have heard of Zulily. This might suggest that they
should focus on activation rather than awareness.

Validating the Personae
Add a field in your CRM, and have sales reps select
their best guess for each customer. Or maybe you
can define actions that will let you tag people in GA.

Using a 2-d matrix
You can also try plotting your personae on a matrix of two relevant dimensions.
The example on the following slide shows ten ‘book buying’ personae, plotted on the dimensions of how
many books they buy, and how tech-savvy they are. An ebook company might decide to target ‘intellectuals’
and ‘digital worms’ (to persuade them to switch to their service), techies (who they can persuade to read
more) and book worms (who they can introduce to the benefits of ereading.)

High tech usage
Low tech usage
Adopters
Passives
Best Sellers
13%
Techies
6%
Casuals
15%
Disengaged
7%
Gifters
15%
Digital
Worms
5%
Intellectuals
15%
Book
Worm
3%
Happy at
Home
9%
Budgeters
12%
High book
engagement
Readers
eReaders
Low book
engagement

An example of a fully-fleshed persona. This was one
of three, created for a consumer electronics
company. Countless other example exist online!

WHO
When running through the process quickly, you don’t
need fancy stock photos. A quick sketch can remind
you who is who.

WHEN
during the customer journey
do we want to reach them?

Traditional Customer Paths
The traditional purchase funnel was developed in
1898. The modern reality is that it’s a lot harder to
quantify where people are at; this model also doesn’t
go back to when people didn’t even realize the
problem they had, or the marketing they were in.

Customer Modalities
Various modes exist. People are likely to have fairly
unique experiences in getting from awareness to
purchase.

A New Model of Customer Modes
Blissful ignorance, no problems
Determines they have an issue that needs solving
Recurring issue ←→ once-in-a-lifetime question
Maybe researches solutions
Maybe gets influenced; maybe they’ve already been exposed
Could be passively or actively searching
Maybe they have a favorite brand
Makes decisions about what brand & product to buy
Decides where to buy it from
Different triggers may help the customer determine they have a problem, such as intrinsic/situational (‘I
deserve a holiday’), external (‘my coffee machine is broken’), or opportunistic (‘I didn’t realize I had a problem
until I found this product that solves it!’). MarketingProfs.com has a model with eight different trigger types.

Variety of Paths
The pattern of modes they pass through will be intertwined with their persona. Some folks want to do a lot
more online research; others are happy to trust the instore salesman.
In some industries, people add significantly more brands to consideration as they go through the process.
Your website analytics can show if there are groups of people who purchase quickly, or who spend a long
time researching, and their traffic source / landing page might give you a hint about what mode they’re in.

Example: Market Leaders with Predictable Paths
We worked with a client who makes some of the
hidden hardware behind ‘connected home’
technology. With an ~80% share, they benefit from
just getting people into the market, rather then
necessarily having to sell them on the brand itself.

Example: Market Leaders with Predictable Paths
Which is quite reminiscent of De Beers in the 80s:
they only had to persuade people to buy diamond
engagement rings, and they would always benefit.

Example: Very Different Paths
People can take extremely different paths within the
same market, such as our divorce lawyer client.
Some people spend a long time thinking about
getting a divorce and researching lawyers. Other
people have just had papers served, and have to
choose a lawyer extremely quickly.

WHO - WHEN
Problem
Definition Awareness Research Conversion
You can now decide when you are going to engage
with each of those personae, ie: what mode will they
be in when they first see your content/messaging?

message would you like those
potential customers to hear?
WHAT

Those People; Those Moments
For those people, at that moment: what do you want
them to hear? How do you want to change their
mind?
Maybe share a USP or value prop to support their
research? Maybe a clear, commercial call to action?
Maybe you just want to tell them you exist, or even
just help them out with an issue they have right now
– even if that doesn’t generate a sale for you.

The Message Must Match Their Familiarity
One point to be aware of: how well will they know you
at this point? Do they know the brand, or what your
value prop is? Do they know you’re a potential solution
to their problem?

Questions You’ll Have to Answer Eventually
Remember: at some point. you’ll have to explain:
your services, your location, your unique selling
proposition, advantages, etc.

Understanding your Differentiation
Relevance
Low
High
Differentiation
Low High
Neutrals
Must
Haves
Drivers
Fools’
Gold
For different product features, McKinsey’s model reminds us to ask how differentiated your product is – and
how much the consumers care about that. In hindsight, I’ve had clients distracted by marketing a message
that was “fools’ gold” – an feature where they were highly differentiated, but that the market wasn’t
interested in. The ‘drivers’ are where you should be taking the opportunity to show off!

Understanding your Personality
The message you want to share might be your
brand’s personality. You can’t always just tell people
this – they may have to be shown and infer it for
themselves.
This guest post on AVC is the jumping off point for
thinking about personality in brand and marketing.

For example:: Johnnie Walker is a good time drink. It
loves parties, it loves people. It hates things that are
normal.

Glenfiddich loves the outdoors and solitude. It hates
people and wants to be as far away from them as
possible.

Social Proof
Social proof is one example of message; the brand
isn’t validating how good the product is: people just
like you are.

Six Kinds of Message
1) Directional Messages
2) Messages of Possibility
3) Messages of Reality
4) Messages of Necessity
5) New Idea Messages
6) Reframing Messages
This model is a framework that describes six
different types of marketing message.

What You Should Do:
“The best way to achieve [goal] is [approach] .”

“Something else is possible”
[Example]

“Here’s how things really are”
[Example]

“We need to [take action] .”
[Example]

“Here’s something new!”
[Example]

“Weakness is strength; ugly is beautiful; good is bad,”
[Example]

Surveying & Testing Message
Your surveys can also pick up on the importance of
different things, and the messages that will resonate
with those people at that moment; ConversionXL has
some more good information about that,
You can test messages through PPC (as Tim Feriss
did for Four Hour Workweek), or see what generates
engagement on your social channels.

Maintaining Scent
Keep your messages ‘joined up’ as someone moves
through different channels. In one of these examples
the ad & the landing page are consistent, in the other
the messages are mismatched. (Eg. 1, Eg. 2.)

WHO - WHEN - WHAT
Problem
BRAND X IS
AN OPTION
I WISH I
COULD _____
BRAND X IS
A NOVEL
SOLUTION
BRAND X IS
AVAILABLE
AT MY STORE
Now you can take you ‘who’ and ‘when’ and
determine ‘what’ message you want them to take
away from the engagement.

do we get that
message to them?
WHERE

paid search • organic search • local search •
product search • display • retargeting • gmail
ads • owned social • social coverage • bought
social • social advertising • social retargeting •
referral traffic • review sites • blog coverage •
product placement • content amplification •
news coverage • media buys • email • earned
email • paid email • partners • affiliates • events
Channels
Pretty much every channel has earned, owned &
paid components. When you SWOT individual
channels, one ‘strength' might be your existing
presence there

Channels
paid search • organic search • local search •
product search • display • retargeting • gmail
ads • owned social • social coverage • bought
social • social advertising • social retargeting •
referral traffic • review sites • blog coverage •
product placement • content amplification •
news coverage • media buys • email • earned
email • paid email • partners • affiliates • events
I’ve been excited by the success we’re seeing with
some more experimental channels recently.

Choosing Channels
Content & channel are well linked. Use the content matrix to cross reference a point in the process and a
message type , to choose a content type / channel.

Choosing Channels
Google’s research can help in choosing channels.

Google
Marketing
Search engine optimization
search engine
Internet terminology
Web search
Learning
Cognition
Perception
...
What Are Those People Into?
Try taking your social followers, then find the last 20-
30 links they shared, and aggregate the domains to
find out which sites they value the content from.
Or pass all those links through the AlchemyAPI to
find which topics are of interest to your audience.

New Channels of Influence
Which intermediaries do these people use? Who are
‘celebrities’ to them? For any given channel, who are
the major influencers for this persona?

Variety in Social
Instagram Pinterest LinkedIn
Social channels are all completely different. You’ll
already be familiar with the differences, but use the
data that is out there to help with selection.

Example: PR coverage + Amplification
This article presumably converts really well – and
the brand gets more eyeballs on it by using content
amplification within BusinessInsider, via Taboola.

Picking Appropriate Channels
McKinsey shared an example from a home appliance
manufacturer, who spent most of their marketing
dollars on content for their website – and had
advertising spend across print, TV and display.

Picking Appropriate Channels
Insight:
Less than 9% of customers went to manufacturer website.
Action:
Brand reduced spend on their website & traditional advertising
Increased spend on content for retailer websites
Outcome:
Lead to an immediate 21% uplift in ecommerce sales

Does your website need to be in the process?
An IT consultant published this deck on Slideshare to
target a specific error code. The phrase now gets
60,000 monthly searches and he ranks ~1-2. He’ll
drive many thousands of people to his solutions this
year, without the need for a strong website.

WHO - WHEN - WHAT - WHERE
Problem
IN THE PRESS
TWITTER
REVIEW SITES
BRAND-X.com
Now decide where you’re going to get that message
in front of the right people.

Moving the Needle
The easiest way to win in the short term is to
measure all the needles. That way, you always have
something you can celebrate, because some metric
has always improved over the last month/quarter.
This is the measurement/analytics part. If you’re not
measuring, you won’t know it’s working. You have to
move the needle!

# of top of funnel content pages
produced
# of commercial landing pages
optimized
# of bloggers, influencers,
journalists engaged with
# of pages indexed by Google
# of new linking root domains
Domain Authority
Ranking positions
Organic traffic to TOF pages
Organic traffic to product pages
Organic traffic $$$ contribution
to conversions
Activities Leading Indicators Success Metrics
Indicators & Metrics: Example for SEO
Differentiate between the important indicators and
the actual metrics of success.

WHO - WHEN - WHAT - WHERE - WHY
Problem
SOCIAL
INFLUENCE
PRESS
COVERAGE
REFERAL
TRAFFIC
ON SITE
ENGAGEMENT
Define your leading indicators & success metrics for
each channel.

Putting it into Action
Now you have to take the WHO, WHEN, WHAT,
WHERE, WHY and do something with it. Hopefully as
you answer those questions, the ‘how’ itself
becomes pretty emergent.

EXAMPLEA quick example, where we used this framework to
very quickly get a marketing plan together for the
client. It was based on some existing industry
insights, and that took less than a couple of hours,

The Business
The client supports people’s genealogy research. For example: if I wanted data from the records office in a
small Polish city, or if I wanted to photograph the gravestone of an ancestor in Sweden, I’d have to get on a
plane to visit, and probably hire a local translator.
This client has a network of freelancers, providing genealogy services to people between different countries,
and can service people everywhere. They’re also aware that as well as an older crowd, genealogy is finding
a new surge in popularity with young folks.

Who
Sylvia the Silver Surfer - Retirement has left her with
plenty of time & money, but the arrival of another
grandson is making her think about the legacy she’ll
leave. Tech savvy & matriarch of the family records -
she’s currently researching their European ancestors.
Casey the Crafter - Just started senior year at high
school. Loves crafting & is always on the lookout for
her next project. She had her first taste of genealogy
through a ‘family tree’ project at school.

When
We want to reach her while she’s trying to uncover
hard-to-access records in foreign countries.
We want to reach her as she begins her genealogy
journey - possibly many years before her first purchase.

What
We have experts in the countries you need, who can retrieve records, take
photos, compile information - they’ll work on as much or as little of the
process as you’d like. Using our independent researchers is significantly
cheaper than flying to Europe, especially if you’ll need to hire a translator.
Genealogy can be loads of fun - and it’s good to have a friend to help you
along the way. Our team have put together tons of free resources &
genealogy information for you - including scrapbook & family tree
templates, and we’ve reviewed all the best free research & design
software.
“
“

Where
Search: commercial keyword terms; target with PPC immediately and a
medium-term investment in SEO
Social: through Facebook; earning coverage from the brands she follows, and
through targeted ads.
Social: mainly through Pinterest & Instagram, showing designs and templates
Blogs: craft & design bloggers (guest posts & placements)
Search: responding to ‘how-to’ and ‘resource queries’

How
Examples of what visibility will look like on search and social

How
Lots of resource content will be posted on our site, and we’ll push some to other sites as guest posts.
On Pinterest we don’t own a popular channel yet, so we’ll earn coverage and pay our way in as well.

who • when • what • where • why
RECAP

WHO
Who are we trying to reach?

WHO - WHEN
Problem
When during the customer journey do we want to
reach them?

WHO - WHEN - WHAT
Problem
BRAND X IS
AN OPTION
I WISH I
COULD _____
BRAND X IS
A NOVEL
SOLUTION
BRAND X IS
AVAILABLE
AT MY STORE
What message would we like those potential
customers to hear?

WHO - WHEN - WHAT - WHERE
Problem
IN THE PRESS
TWITTER
REVIEW SITES
BRAND-X.com
Where do we get that message to them?

WHO - WHEN - WHAT - WHERE - WHY
Problem
SOCIAL
INFLUENCE
PRESS
COVERAGE
REFERAL
TRAFFIC
ON SITE
ENGAGEMENT
Why are we doing this? Which metrics measure
success?

Thanks!
Send me your feedback via @RobOusbey or rob.ousbey@distilled.net
Help others by sharing this deck on Twitter.

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Creative Routines (Slide 3)
Nesting Robots (Slide 11)
Blueprints (Slide 12)
Watch (Slide 13)
Boho Chic Chair (Slide 16)
Zoltar (Slide 19)
Interviewing (Slide 22)
Server Racks (Slide 23)
Mall (Slide 29)
Library Drawers (Slide 32)
Motorized Blinds (Slide 44)
Billboard (Slide 49)
Checklist (Slide 51)
Book Shelves (Slide 64)
Content Matrix (Slide 70)
Airplane Cockpit (Slide 81)
Gravestone (Slide 87)
Family Records (Slide 87)
Record Drawers (Slide 87)
Family Tree (Slide 87)
’Sylvia’ headshot (Slide 88)
‘Casey’ headshot (Slide 89)
Image Credits

Making Marketing Strategy Easier

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