What Startups Should Know About Leveraging Data to Begin Digital Marketing, Part 3
This is the third installment of a session that Adam Roe, of Atlanta-based digital agency FortyFour, presented to a group of entrepreneurs at the B2C hub Switchyards Downtown Club — actionable online marketing ideas and insights which any startup can apply. In the first installment, Adam addressed a key component of marketing our startup — building the best possible product. In part 2, he addressed choosing an initial strategy, building in KPIs from the beginning and understanding Viral Coefficient. Here, he discusses two low-cost paths for ramping up our marketing.
STARTING WITH LOW COST CHANNELS OF MARKETING
SEO
Adam recommended we spend time with, if not actually obsess over, ad words and keywords. It’s one of the easiest, most cost-effective ways to start up the pyramid of social marketing (See Figure 4). Try, measure, and tweak — often. Getting this combination right can improve your return on paid marketing via SEO. As I noted earlier, testing is ingrained in the startup community, but testing in early stage is very different from testing at scale.
In early stage, qualitative feedback can be more helpful than qualitative, and vise-versa. Insights can be skewed with qualitative results, so Adam advised that we should be willing to consider our instincts alongside early results. As he put it, “There will be times where your gut can still be your best data point.” From personal experience, I can attest to the fact that it’s a real balancing act to decide between when your customers say you’re off track, and you believe you’re on track. In contrast to your gut, don’t mistake blind belief or ego for intuition, either. Perhaps the best way to describe this balanced approach is “informed intuition” — which is where spending time with artifacts like ad words and keywords can help without artificially informing direction.
SOCIAL TESTING
Much like having a good product or service is the first ingredient of standard marketing, having a unique perspective or point of view is important to social marketing. Adam referred to this as “finding and owning your shelf space.” Prospects need to see you as genuine, which is important to ascending to the next building blocks. This too will require trial and error — and frequency. And when in doubt about where to go next, he suggested that we should always be willing to ask prospects and customers for an email. It’s a great starting point for a relationship and gives you an opportunity to prove that their time with you will be worthwhile. Or not. A bad fit is better than a false fit. At least you know where you stand with them — and who not to talk to.
Essentially, word of mouth and an authentic relationship go hand-in-hand. One comes as a result of the other. Adam illustrated this with two examples: Barkbox and Casemate. Barkbox is a company Adam admires, so he enjoys showcasing the way they weave marketing into everything they do, while talking honestly about Pets.
But he spent substantially more time talking about his experience at Casemate, a consumer media and computing accessories company. He shared a story about testing what he believed was a strong relationship between Casemate, the tech media, and early adopter consumers. In particular, Casemate realized that people looked to them for insights into what was next with new iPhones. They had been trying to figure out how to get ahead of an upcoming iPhone 5s announcement, and discussed creating a fake page about “the new 5s case” to see how long it would take for media to pick up on it. The plan was that, once it got “noticed,” they would pull it down and await the actual announcement of the new phone format and specs.
One thing led to another, and they ended up trying the “fake case” experiment. It took almost exactly 30 minutes for the fake case page to take off. A blogger named Boy Genius was the first to pick up on the new concept and page, and that was the spark that caught fire. Apparently, not only did the media and bloggers run with the fake case specs — the existence of the fake page made its way onto Apple CEO, Tim Cook’s desk!
…the existence of the fake page made its way onto Apple CEO, Tim Cook’s desk!
Although this was a risky move, it paid off. Casemate properly introduced real specs, banking that consumers would forgive “rumors” and still trust their actual information. And they did! Once the real phone announcement was made, and Casemate was ready with an actual pre-order product, they owned the first five slots in Google search results due to the proliferation of the Casemate name and case concepts on sites.
They only did this once, so as not to betray their relationship with clients, and trusted reputation. But their social media legitimacy paid off. And did so at a very low cost.
Next week — our final installment: testing and establishing ROI against the Intent Pyramid, understanding View-Through, and avoiding the false positives of data averaging.
// Special thanks to Aly Merrit for her ninja editing and Adam Roe
