What Rocket Science Has In Common with Planning A Digital Marketing Campaign
Those two disciplines cannot be any different. However, there are more similarities than you might think.
Building your Marketing Strategy can be such an overwhelmingly difficult task. Just like Rocket Science. I mean, where do you even start when you build a rocket?
I compared those two processes and found out interesting similarities and I’m excited to present them to you.
To explain that to you, NASA helped me with their six-step guide on how to design a rocket and for the Campaign, I’ve used a personal example. My team and I created a blog in the Work-Smart niche and we’ve run some marketing campaigns on it.
Step 1
Know what your Rocket Needs to do | Analyse your Competition
Doing proper research is such an essential aspect of building a good marketing strategy. To get a complete understanding of the niche, we did the following analysis:
Competitor analysis
- Who is in the same niche?
- What do they do?
- Where are they good?
These were all questions we had to answer ourselves about the Work-Smart niche.
And how is it with Building a Rocket? Well, not that different.
As a first step, NASA advises that you get to know the kind of rocket you want to build. If the rocket has to be designed for human exploration of deep space, you need to know what is important as requirements.
Compared with the Digital Marketing Campaign — The Human exploration of deep space would be the equivalent to our Work-Smart Niche, and clarifying the requirements would be the competitor analysis we’ve done.
Right, the competitor analysis.
To get a better overview, we divided the type of competitors into direct and indirect.
Direct competitors have the same core business as we have, whereas indirect competitors have a different core business, but touch our area. So for us, an indirect competitor was:
Name: Trello
Type of competitor: indirect
Summary of the business: Projectmanagement Software to fulfil tasks within a team. However, the page also promotes tips & tricks on working smart, but it’s not their primary business.
Advantage: The tool is intuitive and very easy-to-use.
Disadvantage: If the project concerns more than just one team, it is very likely to get messy.
SWOT — Analysis
The competition was evident now, so we jumped right into external and internal environmental analysis. For this step, we’ve used the SWOT Analysis method to get all the influences together.
If you need further information on the SWOT — Analysis, check out this blogpost as it covers all you need to know in much more detail.
After completing this analysis, we’ve had a clear overview of our surroundings and were now ready to define the goals.
Step 2
Establishing the Mission Parameters | Setting Goals
There is no point in building a Rocket and then, not knowing where to get to. Mars, Jupiter, Venus? What’s helping in rocket science, there are numerous studies out there on how to get to Mars for example. You then have to choose the best way, settle your Rocket and launch.
This is the thing in rocket science, explained in four lines. How about Digital Marketing, are there also just studies we can copy?
If it only would be so easy.
To further define the vision and mission of our blog and also get to know our goals in more detail, we’ve used the following strategies:
1 Business Strategy
We’ve created a broad overview of our blog and our purpose with the following information:
- Business Name: Blended Working
- Mission Statement: With hands-on experience reports and experiments, we want to transform how people work and inspire change.
- Objectives: We publish experience reports, evaluations of different methods and introduce various tools
- Value Proposition: Our team works agile and has experiences in different industries, and want to entertain with our content.
- Elevator Pitch: How to save time at work to make space for the most critical tasks.
2 Customer Strategy
In Customer Strategy, we’ve used the insights gained from the Business Strategy to define our audience in more detail:
- Target Audience: Employees between 18–30 years
- Audience Goals: Increase efficiency
- Audience Technology: Internet, Blogs, Linkedin
This was only one of our targeted audience.
3 Marketing Strategy
For each audience, we’ve then defined their specific and individual goals. Before we dive into the Marketing Strategy, I first need to introduce the different kind of Medias, as seen in Image 2.
For the audience of employers from 18–30 years, the goal is to increase efficiency. So now we defined how we’re going to reach the audience’s goal with our content through using Paid, Earned and Owned Media:
- Channel: Blog
- Paid Media: not used
- Earned Media: Sponsered promotion through another Instagram account
- Owned Media: Publish bi-weekly blog posts
As the audience is not only on blogs but also on Linkedin, we’ve done the same for this channel:
- Channel: Linkedin
- Paid Media: not used
- Earned Media: not used
- Owned Media: Promoting blog posts through the Linkedin page of blended working
Step 3
Call in Experts/Start Drawing | Define Different Channels
With the information we’ve put together in the previous step, we were now ready to define the channels we intended to use for our marketing campaign. In our marketing campaign, we talk about channels, NASA talks about experts.
You might ask yourself now, where is the connection? Good question.
Channels basically bring the idea we’ve put together in the blog to the audience, whereas an expert does the same. He spills out ideas, lots and lots of ideas about building a rocket and brings it to the right audience.
To visualize the channels clearly, we’ve used a Customer Journey. This journey is divided into five steps and for each step, we’ve inserted the symbol according to the channel that we’ve used.
Making it more feasible, find down below the text on how to interpret the Customer Journey above:
We catch our targeted audience on Linkedin and convince them through our landing page from my business to stay. With compelling blog posts about hands-on experiences on working smart, I then convert them into fans and make sure they’re coming back through e-mail engagement and our growth will continue through networking.
Now we make the comparison again: The Customer Journey is the equivalent to the Rocket’s Blueprint. So let’s dive also into the blueprint.
I’ve done some research online on how to understand rocket blueprints and I ended up studying how to read construction plans for beginners.
Honestly, it helped and other than that was very interesting to dive into the topic of constructing a house. Learn something new everyday and mine for the day was understanding a construction plan.
But you see another “kind of” similarity.
Let’s get back to the Digital Marketing Campaign.
Step 4
Whittle Down the Possibilities | Campaigning
This is now the heart of our Marketing Strategy: Defining the instruments we want to use to reach our targeted audience best way possible! In rocket science, scientists need to get an overview of all the rockets to make a good decision. Much as it is in our Digital Marketing Campaign, where we need to choose the instruments we want to use.
Timeframe
In terms of the campaign’s timeframe, we’ve decided that we wanted to run the campaign for about a month to get good insights and value out of it.
Content calendar
First of all, we’ve created a content calendar for our blog to overview the publication dates of our blog posts. To have the best possible overview, we’ve used the tool Notion to keep on track. You should give it a try, too!
Keyword Research
As we also had other audiences than just employees 18–30 years, we’ve decided to run a Google Ads campaign as well. So, therefore, we needed to understand which one’s where the best keywords in our niche. There are a ton of tools out there to use to get hold of the best keywords. We decided to use the following (they are all free):
Of course, we also used the Keyword Planner that comes together with Google Ads. This was also a beneficial resource.
If you want to learn much more about keyword research as well as Digital Marketing in general, I recommend the following course from Google:
Google Analytics Goals
To check whether our campaign is successful or not, we’ve put together an overview of the goals we want to achieve regarding Google Analytics KPI’s.
The percentages next to the different KPI’s is the weighting we’ve put on that specific number. For example, “Time Spent on page” was more important than the “Number of Users”.
In numbers, that meant the following:
- An average session time of 4 minutes
- Average of 30 unique visitors per day
- Returning rate of 25% at the end of the campaign
- A Bounce Rate of 40%
Pretest
Before starting the campaign, we did a Pretest to see if Google Analytics is working correctly and if we have to make any adjustments about the keywords or anything else.
After making the last adjustments, we’ve then launched the campaign, and it runs for a total of 30 days straight.
During the campaign, we monitored the performance quite closely each day, in case we needed to change something or if there was an issue, and we needed to react quickly.
Step 5
Pick the Best Design | Reporting
At the end of the campaign, we reported all the KPI’s that we’ve set as goals and evaluated how well the campaign worked out. Therefore we’ve used, as previously introduced, Google Analytics to get all the necessary information.
An average session time of 4 minutes
Didn’t reach the goal.
The final result was 3.17 minutes, so there was a difference of 43 seconds.
Average of 30 unique visitors per day
Reached the goal.
The final result was 80 visitors per day, so we’ve exceeded the goal by 50 users per day.
Returning rate of 25% at the end of the campaign
Didn’t reach the goal.
The final result was a returning rate of 20.5%, so there was a difference of about 4.5%.
A Bounce Rate of 40%
Didn’t reach the goal.
The final result was a bounce rate of 45%, so we’ve had a difference of 5%.
As there are slightly different goals between a Space Journey and a Digital Marketing Campaign, the last step as a scientist would be to chose the right rocket.
Surprisingly, there are so many similarities.
Through this comparison, I’ve got a different view of the Digital Marketing Campaign we’ve planned. I will definitely use this method also for other processes and things — Compare two supposedly different topics to get some more ideas on how to proceed in the future.
Appreciate your support!
I’m always curious about different techniques, methods, and point of views. A Big “Thank You” already in advance for your support in sharing this post with your network.
