Digital Marketing Advice From A Mediocre Fisherman

Greetings from Creede, Colorado, the last stop on my summer vacation tour. As summer closes, I’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on the skills I’ve used over the last few months…fishing for instance.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of fishing on this trip, and find digital marketing to be a lot like fishing.

You start with some hypotheses about where you think you’ll catch the most fish, but it’s all about testing out different fishing holes.

And the testing never ends.

We set it up to measure KPIs at each stage of the funnel, with a heavy emphasis on acquisition, retention, and referral.

Some generalities …

• AdWords will always look like your best ROI, as the traffic is often bottom of the funnel (ready to make a purchase decision), and the ROI math on AdWords doesn’t typically include whatever top of funnel (awareness) activities got the traffic to Google in the first place.
• When it comes to feeding the funnel, I’ve seen influencer marketing with YouTube stars drive monster traffic with a very low cost per click ($0.01), but then have also seen very low conversion rates from that traffic. That was in a nascent product category though. It’s definitely worth testing this fishing hole.
• Facebook followers … a lot of companies have been burned by Facebook and their rule changes. It doesn’t do a lot of good to invest in building up a Facebook follower base if most of your followers won’t see your posts organically, and that’s generally what happens these days. If you post to your followers, the post might end up in 10% of their feeds, unless you pay to promote your post. You also have to consider the mindset when visiting Facebook … people are often in mindless entertainment mode vs buying mode when perusing their feed. That said, Facebook ads should, of course, be tested.
• Overall, I’m a big believer that the message is way more important than the medium. There too it’s about testing. Don’t buy into the idea that your marketing should always be consistent. It should only be consistent once you’ve found the magic.

Signing off for now. To be continued. Insert fishing pun here.

By: David Maren — Vice President of Strategy