Author: remap_content_admin

Using software algorithms, or algorithmic human processes, to make marketing decisions. Such decisions revolve around:

• say/display/show/send
• when, how much, or how frequently to do so
• to whom the above applies to
• when to stop doing the above

Common types of marketing automation include email drips, outreach email marketing, display advertising, content personalization, customized interactivity such as daisy chains, internationalization, and retargeting.

Notes
Marketing automation is under-utilized but when it is utilized, it’s typically over relied upon. The more a business automates marketing, the more room there is for (a) mistakes at scale and (b) expertise-based decision making.

A workplace-psychology phenomenon whereby it’s extremely difficult to de-promote someone once they been granted a promotion – no matter how badly suited they are for their new role.

Coined by Kevin Kelly:

a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence. 

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” Clay Shirky’s words – Kevin Kelly coined the term.

The target for this principle is the big nonprofit industry, major corporations and organs of government (to wit, the “Military Industrial Complex”). 

But the Shirky Principle is conceptually (if not literally) applicable to independent expertise businesses. People who run such institutions are subconsciously inclined to amplify or exaggerate the problems they solve. For organizations like these, the workaround the Shirky Principle is to be diligent in recognizing non-problems.

A theory coined by Kevin Kelly holding that an artist or other content creator needs just 1000 enthusiastic customers to forge a career. The simple math employed in this widely cited and influential article reckons that the enthusiastic fan will pay $100/yr, yielding net revenue of $100,000/yr for the creator.

Whether the specific math is right, or whether it be 100 fans or 2,000 fans, is not the point. The point is to focus on cultivating small, targeted, niche audiences. 

This theory is mis-applied to consultants and entrepreneurs; they have customers, not fans. Thus, they may need far more or far fewer than 1000. For example, a healthy consulting services business has between 8 and 12 customers a year, for a total of perhaps 100 over a business-lifetime.

The first version of a product or productized service that has value both significant value to the user and to the business providing the product. For a product to be considered MVP, if has to have enough value that users are happy to pay for it.

Commonly misunderstood to be the first version of a product that has some value to the user – usually not enough that they are willing to pay for it.

Just a quick note here on “retargeting”, an odd little loophole that makes it possible for small, indie businesses to exploit the exact same advertising strategy used by massive brands. I wrote about this last year but looking over those posts, I wasn’t clear enough.

To be clear: you should get an Adroll account and experiment with retargeting. 

Who knows, maybe this won’t be true in 6 months. But I kinda think it will – and I think you should be aware of it.

On a recent client call, I had the chance to talk shop with another experienced hand at digital marketing. As we spoke, I reflected internally my surprise that retargeting is still the same opportunity as years ago. Gary Vee said in early 2018 that retargeting was a rare opportunity would end in 18 months. I believed this reasonable prediction at the time. But today it’s still a good opportunity; it hasn’t gotten expensive.

Before I go on, here’s how I define it:

Used interchangeably with remarketing, retargeting tracks a person’s visit to a website (via a browser cookie) in order to subsequently show ads to that person on other parts of the Internet.

For example, you visit a web page which details a book you are interested in. Then a month or even six months later, the book seller shows you an ad for that book on Instagram, or anywhere else on the Internet.

You can think of retargeting as “reminder advertising”.

A few important points that I have omitted from the dictionary definition:

• Retargeting is unfairly thought of as privacy-invasive and conflated with truly invasive data aggregation driven by advertising. Properly executed, retargeting can be GDPR-compliant.
• Pretargeting, which is closely related, can also be performed ethically if correctly executed – but it’s trickier. It involves uploading a list of user profiles to an ad network like Facebook to see if any of your users match their users. Ideally you collect your users with something like an email subscription form that has an advertising disclaimer. Anyway, once you upload your list, the network then shows your display ads to matched user profiles already in their system. 
• Together, retargeting and remarketing are referred to as, “warm advertising”. As distinct from cold advertising, such as running ads on Google or Facebook to people who have no idea who you are. The terminological parallel is to sales calling – warm vs cold. 
• Retargeting is the only form of paid ads (as opposed to boosted content) I’d recommend to promote specialized, non-lead-magnet content, such as in-depth stories, podcasts, YouTube channels, or art.

The enduring profitability and low-entry point for retargeting is probably bolstered by:

• the pandemic lockdowns’ effect of creating more total ad space (even while spending on display ads is up 10% in 2020)
• the ongoing aversion to digital advertising
• the fact it’s still misunderstood or lumped in with cold advertising

There may be one more reason – in order for retargeting to be worth the investment, you need some web traffic (not much but some), and ideally, an ecommerce friendly-funnel.

In other words, you need a top of funnel, to drive decent traffic to the landing page where you drop the retargeting pixel. And even if you can’t sell your product or service on your site (that your retargeting ads link to), you should facilitate the booking of demos or sales calls that will do so.

With the above conditions met, retargeting makes sense for most businesses, even with modest web traffic, both because of the availability of easy-to-use adtech, like AdRoll, and because of the low cost of the advertising itself. 

Happy retargeting (:

Rowan

Used interchangeably with remarketing, retargeting tracks a person’s visit to a website (via a browser cookie) in order to subsequently show ads to that person on other parts of the Internet.

For example, you visit a web page which details a book you are interested in. Then a month or even six months later, the book seller shows you an ad for that book on Instagram, or anywhere else on the Internet.

You can think of retargeting as “reminder advertising”.

What is success? My definition isn’t far off from the certification requirements for a B Corporation. These have evolved a lot since back in 2009 when I secured a BCorps badge for my former business, but the basic concept is the same: holistic value-creation.

Thus, I define success in business as the creation of sustainable financial and non-financial value in a way that includes everybody – owners, employees, contractors, customers, partners, community members, fellow citizens, and the environment itself. (Yes, that last bit encompasses flora and fauna.)

Which in turn means your business model designs for this kind of value creation – in fact, B Corps certification requires that your concretize such a business model by altering your company’s legally binding bylaws.

By this definition of success, Walmart is a total failure. For one thing (among many), it does the opposite of creating financial value for its fellow-citizen tax payers – by forcing them to subsidize its own underpaid and exploited workforce. 

And meanwhile, millions of unknown small businesses are successes.

As long as you’re defining success for your business, you might as well think about how that translates to your own success.

*      *      *

As I have mentioned, you should explicitly define all the words important to your business. “Personal success” is probably on that list.

Personal success is harder to define because it’s subjective, cultural, arbitrary, messy, and fluid. The default definition (wealth, power, fame) comes from 17th C. puritan theologians who viewed financial achievement through hard work as evidence of God’s blessing. Some trace the coinage of the concept to a 1684 business and personal development book, “The Tradesman’s Calling”, by Richard Steele. 

Let the religious tradesman be excited to the practice of industry. It conduces much to our temporal prosperity; the diligent are usually blessed with plenty; and no doubt affluence is a blessing…

Popular culture may have a less Godly idea of success than in Steele’s time, but don’t we still suspect that hard work and getting financially rich are inherently virtuous?

If you don’t explain to yourself what a word means, you will use the explications of others. And they may ignore your best interests. If you don’t define your personal success as a participant in your business, then the legacy of Richard Steele will do it for you.

Other, non-financial factors to consider:

• cultivation of expertise or artistry
• influence over a group of people
• quantity and quality of relationships
• quality of spiritual experience
• self-acceptance
• lifestyle balance
• the perfect cry-to-laughter ratio
• contentment

I bet there are many more… the cultivators of lifestyle balance are usually blessed with the perfect cry-to-laughter ratio; and no doubt self-acceptance is a blessing

There’s another way to distance yourself from the Puritans’ idea of business or personal success, however. Stop thinking of it in terms of any subjective qualities, let alone objective metrics, tied to a point in time, such as your 30th birthday or your death. Instead, consider that success is an agreeable state of mind by which you (and your colleagues, clients, etc) experience the work you do today.

To your success,
Rowan

In business, success is the creation of financial and non-financial value for everybody involved: owners, employees, contractors, customers, partners, community members, fellow citizens, etc.

In a nontangible sense, success is also the regular attainment of a “flow state” as you work.

For many, the term is meaningless and nothing more than a synonym for digital marketing, of which it’s actually a subset. In growth hacking, relatively little effort goes into creating trust, establishing quality or expertise, or otherwise designing a long-term marketing strategy. Instead, emphasis is placed on iterative quick wins through generating hype and other direct marketing techniques. Growth hacking often translates to placing creative small bets (targeting influencers, hosting private events, guerilla/small-dollar ad spend) that spur adoption, downloads, or engagement; it applies typically to mobile apps or SaaS software.