Tim Ainsworth is Executive Director of Brand Experience at McCann Manchester and NDA’s monthly columnist.
As we know, marketing strategy is all about choice and, as such, effectiveness will be determined as much by what you choose not to do, as well as what you choose to do.
So, when did we think it was a good idea to hand over so many of our choices to the algorithms? The risk with this strategy is that you end up with self-fulfilling prophecies rather than mastery of one’s own commercial destiny.
Central to this is knowing what marketing levers you need to pull and, therefore, who your audience should be and understanding how easy or not it might be to get them to think and do what you want them to. This might seem obvious, but far too many challenger brands skip this step and risk optimising themselves into suboptimal positions.
Let me explain…
Almost every challenger brand I’ve ever come across started life on Google and then started to dabble in Meta as the next logical step out of the quagmire of ever-increasing performance costs.
A number of challenges present themselves with this approach (listed in diminishing order of return):
- You allow the algorithms to find you more of what converted before, rather than necessarily determining what future prosperity should look like.
- You don’t have enough conversions to build growth from statistically significant results.
- Meta’s audience “starter for 10” targeting parameters are somewhat limited compared to other channels; “18-21s interested in chairs” doesn’t necessarily give you what you need, for instance.
Critical to future success is to take some time to examine where the growth should come from before you even put a penny into the ad manager.
In truth, and when it comes to marketing, there are only really 4 levers you can pull to identify your future sources of value:
Penetration: How many people or households buy your brand?
Customer Demand: How much of the category do they buy per annum?
Share of Requirement: What share of people’s repertoire does your brand have?
Margin: How much do we make on each purchase?
As a challenger, you’re more likely to be limited to a share or margin goal (unless your products or service is genuinely unique and new). To achieve either, and without being delusional, you either have to have invented a “category killer” (please stop comparing yourself to Uber or Amazon) OR have something particularly attractive to a niche that is suitably different to the existing comparators and at a price that isn’t in the dead zone (too expensive for the bargain segment or too cheap for the quality segment); perhaps less than 1% of the total marketing universe for the category (which could still yield £millions in revenue opportunity).
And, so, audience identification prioritisation becomes critical. You have to be exceptionally clear about who you are for and who you are not AND honest about why anyone would spend time or money with you. Time was you’d need expensive market research methodologies to help you with this – often segmentations can cost into the £100Ks – but a process of elimination born of a realistic understanding of the socio and macroeconomic factors affecting different groups – often blending and nesting largely publicly available data – can get you far.
At McCANN, we developed Audience Vibrancy Score to calculate this. Importantly, it can help to understand audiences which may, for instance, have fallen out of market in real time (perhaps owing to cost of living pressures) and those that may have dropped in (perhaps owing to cost of living pressures dropping a higher affluent audience into your sweet spot, for instance).
Second, be clear on where you sit in the market. Your scale of brand and category penetration will determine whether you’re in the business of launching, entering, growing or leading a category.
Third, look for metrics that might be indicative of achieving the right direction of future travel, even if you need to allow the algos to rule the roost while you’re figuring this out. Lofty brand metrics such as awareness and consideration can a) be costly to measure and b) slow to move, but there are plenty of metrics in the free wheelhouse that can demonstrate goal progress: even simple metrics such as time spend on site.
Understanding who you should be for will result in better communications planning, better CX design, better media planning, creative work and effectiveness. Funnily enough, you’ll find your Meta results improve, too.
