4 Tips to Win at Marketing During Uncertain Times

tl;dr: take the time to upgrade your marketing engine

Now more than ever may be a really good time to re-evaluate your marketing engine and break it free from a single-channel focus.

Here are the 4 things you should do to strengthen and upgrade your growth marketing engine:

1/ Fix your digital plumbing leaks aka tracking custom events and adding them to a dashboard/report

Marketers waste time reconciling their acquisition metrics with incomplete or untracked goals.

You can't make data-driven arbitrages if your data is not accurate.

You can't automate performance reports production if they're not telling the right story.

Marketers waste money because they're ignoring how important it is to properly configure a conversion-tracking pixel and to clearly map the events they need to measure

The goal is to perfectly reflect the steps of your business funnel in pixel-tracked events on your website/app.

This is applicable to all following platforms: GoogleAds (Search, Display, YouTube), Snapchat, Pinterest, Linkedin, Twitter, all platforms asking you to place a conversion pixel.

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Suggested tools:

• GoogleTagManager
• Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/Pinterest pixel helpers (Chrome extensions)
• Migration upgrade to Google Analytics 4
• A dashboard to rule them all : Databox

2/ Try on new social platforms with business accounts and get familiar with ad platforms (reddit, TikTok, Snapchat, mobile ad networks)

The most difficult part of deploying a campaign might not be a creative angle nor the ad copy but the job of putting it in the system with the right parameters (hello pixels and custom conversion events).

Meta/Facebook Business Manager is so hard it requires a PhD in web navigation. Google Ads is a marathon for maze-runners.

It takes time and practice to know your way around so you'd better warm up your next channel.

Fortunately, all ad platforms now tend to use the same language and terms.

Facebook has really paved the way when it comes to defining configuration mechanics and architecture.

To such extent that Snapchat once mimicked Facebook's ad manager UI and later redesigned it.

The copycat war between the companies also happened on the ad business side.

Get familiar with these new ad platforms. You don't need an active page to run your paid posts. Of course, you cannot but explore TikTok. Take a page from Burger King's book.

Burger King is giving TikTok users a chance to get discounts on food by posting videos of themselves doing special dance moves. The #WhopperDance challenge is the first time people can order a Whopper through "dance ordering only".

• Users can find a tutorial on those moves on the personal pages of TikTok stars
• TikTok users also must follow the Burger King account on TikTok, use the special soundtrack provided in the tutorial videos and caption their videos with the #WhopperDance hashtag. Burger King sends participants a direct message that includes an offer-code for the BK App.

The marketing literature about it insane right now. It just launched 'TikTok for Business' Platform for Marketers. It includes tips, notes, and links to other TikTok tools, like its Creator Marketplace and its self-serve ad platform.

Reddit is "the front page of the internet". They reported 430M monthly active users at the end of 2019. That's the closest you can get to observe the word-of-mouth mechanism happening in real-time. You can find there passionate and diverse communities organized around thousands of different topics.

3/ Refresh your Audience Insights

It's very easy to be romantic and stuck with Ideal Customer Profiles and Personae. Because marketers tend to execute against a controlled and safe view of who the buyer is, they're missing the point of building an entire army of sub-audiences to test and run against the baseline persona.

That's because the ad platforms make it easy to find, suggest, and use generic targeting interests. It's basic and average. You can do better. Here's how:

1. Master all the variations of Google Audiences

Remarketing Lists: Lists of users based on traffic that meets certain criteria on your own website (visited but didn’t arrive at a particular page, visited a combination of pages, users who arrived at a confirmation page, etc.).

In-Market Audiences: Users actively researching, comparing, and/or shopping for goods and services of a particular type.

Affinity Audiences: People who match a “holistic picture of their lifestyles, passions, and habits.”

Detailed Demographics: Users who match a particular trait including student, homeowner, engaged, and more.

Similar Audiences: Lists generated based on eligible remarketing list or customer list.

Customer Lists: Lists of email addresses, addresses, or phone numbers from eCommerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommercea third-party data sources like a customer relationship management tool, a marketing platform like Hubspot, Salesforce, or Marketo.

Life Events: Users who have achieved or are in the process of achieving a significant life event including marriage, engagement, recently purchased a home, and others.

Custom Intent & Custom Affinity: Lists of audiences based on intent or likely intent, sometimes based on keywords.

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==> Go with the ‘But No One Else Would’ trick.

‍The Golf example by DigitalMarketer is self-explanatory.

• Understand the brand territory and test new waters within your audience to try out some new content or offers.
• The Facebook Audience Insights Tool will help you segment your defined “seed” audience based on different preferences and demographic details. It is a great resource to tap in terms of what trends and topics might interest your audience.
• If you navigate to the Page Likes tab (just to the right of Demographics) you’ll be able to see the Top Categories for which your audience will most likely engage.

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• There's a new awesome cool tool around: SparkToro.

4/ Add Search Listening to your audience and content insight research

There are over 3.5 billion searches on Google alone every day and 4.54 billion active internet users in the world. Each one of those represents insight and an opportunity.

Not only do people search for information about products and services online, but they also share secrets they wouldn’t dare share on a social network, with a peer or on a brand questionnaire.

The perfect target audience insight right?

Those people go to Google every day, all day, to find out everything. From day to day questions like ‘how to make salsa’, to private questions people wouldn't ask their friends or family, like ‘how do you kiss a girl?’

Google knows people better than anyone. Google provides search data for free. Luckily for you, there's the ultimate tool to just find your next hidden insights: AnswerThePublic.

Here's a winning example

A large hard-drive storage firm wanted to raise awareness of their products to a wider audience. Their products can be used for all sorts of files and data however their current customer base is mainly business so they want to appeal to a consumer market.

The team selected photography and photo storage as a key use of their products for consumers so wanted to explore the topic further...

The search insight highlighted interesting queries that can be associated with different types of personas and topics. Including;

• What to do when photo storage is full
• Best photo storage in different scenarios such as traveling and family occasions
• More urgent questions such as ‘why is my iPhone photo storage full’?

The insights set the foundations of the ideas session. Those ideas were mapped out using the (PESO) marketing plan:

Paid promotion included:

• Promoting the quarterly guide on-site through Google Adwords using ‘phone storage’ related keywords as the target
• Promotion of the Parent blogger tips and guide content on relevant lifestyle websites and next to parenting articles through Outbrain

Earned media work included:

• Expert consultations with bloggers on their storage
• A round-up of the worst ‘missed photo moments’ from people that had run out of phone storage at key moments in their lives

Shared

• Worst moment of losing a photo opportunity through running out of storage
• Celebrities share how many times their fans run out of storage & miss the photo opp

Owned Content

The team began with content as they wanted to build all amplification methods (paid, earned, and shared) around it.

Content plans included:

• Quarterly guides on photo storage based on phone technology
• Parent blogger tips on saving the important moments with kids
• Fashion blogger tips on saving shots of your daily looks