A couple of weeks ago I participated in a team discussion where the Head of Operations and the Marketing person where pitching to the CEO about the strategies to take and the need for a budget for those.
The Marketing person had all this ideas about Facebook Ads, Twitter cards and email campaigns. His assumption was that this would bring traffic to the website as also app downloads. There was a need for brand presence due that the company was in the early stages and no one knew about it. The problem was that he didn’t have any data on this. None. Zero. He wanted to spend all this money to actually get data on clicks and impressions to “understand” the user and future customer. Here is where I got skeptical.
The Head of Operations wanted the money going directly to the users and customers to get them to try the product. She tried to explain that the best way to “understand” the customer was to go directly and talk to them. Explain the product and give it for free for a period of time and incentivize them to share it with others, and that they would only actually share it if they actually founded value out of it. That the money could make the trick but it won’t get the second person on board. She was trying to get some truth in her assumptions.
