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Companies all grow at their own pace.
I’ve found over the years that while you can push your company to grow, you can’t usually force it.
When trying to make something happen that a company is not ready for, things break. People leave. Things break down. Which can only stall the growth process.
So, companies, like people, take patience and time to grow.
Animus Digital, my agency, has learned many lessons over the years, but one that left our team with the most learnings was transforming a 50-year-old business’s marketing budget from traditional media outlets, print, and old-style SEO — to digital advertising and remarketing.
The story is not that interesting, but the learnings will help any entrepreneur or business make the right decisions as they attempt to grow — ESPECIALLY if you have a mixed-age demographic.
Here are a few of the key takeaways our team learned from this specific transition.
Before moving in on any changes to the existing strategy, we always prefer to take a baseline of what is working, who its working with, and what sales its producing.
My opinion: never believe an agency that gives you suggestions before doing this unless its simply impossible to gather that info.
We saved ourselves here, because if we’d begun an aggressive move to digital before really considering audience data, we would have missed the fact that the majority of the trust with this company was that 65%+ of their audience had a great disposable income, great net worth, great trust in the brand — BUT was over the age of 45.
Therefore running a brand recall campaign would be helpful as these individuals and families already knew about the brand, but would not be looking as consistently on digital outlets — and more importantly, they would not be actively considering buying the product.
When a brand has only done TV and Radio advertising as their primary tactic, this can make targeting interesting for digital media.
And by that I mean — very interesting. IE — we have nothing to target because your typical TV or Radio outlet is not going to provide that information with great detail.
So we had to alter our transition to a slower pace, using facebook with suspected demographic targeting to really narrow in on similar interests to the mass population, specifically considering needs for individuals at that age.
As a fan of shark tank, sure, I understand the intrigue of wanting to BLITZ THE MARKET and make business more interesting.
Fast and dangerous sounds sexy and courageous.
Most sayings like this should be considered slurs of stupidity because in my experience, rarely do people actually need to rush, spend absurd amounts of money, and put together a half-assed campaign that doesn’t work.
For what — to compete more in the market?
There are usually other reasons someone rushes something like this — not today’s conversation…
While we tend to be more methodical and thoughtful before launching a campaign at Animus Digital, we had to be especially slow in making changes for this larger budget.
Will other companies do it differently? Sure.
With the age of the audience, the lack of quality data around marketing, the lack of previous digital experience for the company, and very little understanding of what to expect — we started a year-long push to transition the budget quarter-over-quarter.
In these updates each quarter:
We would do many of these things naturally, but had to be much more thoughtful with how many years in business the brand had, yet lack of data around how they were getting results.
If you’ve lived in the corporate space long enough, maybe you have abided by this mindset before.
This client had not.
What is funny is that most people won’t argue with the mindset and it seems to flow logically with how most of us operate in life.
Candidly, many, if not most, businesses make marketing decisions without clear data being collected.
That’s a harsh reality.
This means that most companies are “shotgunning” their money into the open market, hoping for some random passerby to notice and make a purchase.
Yikes.
This company had struggled to gather data aside from some all-star key players within the company that had done some of the work and had a good tether to reality.
The problem is when you are marketing digitally, you really want to have a solid “baseline,” as I mentioned before, of the buyer’s journey.
What their experience looked like. How many steps did it take to acquire them? How much did it cost? Where did they come from? ETC…
In larger companies, this can require coordination with various department leaders.
Our first step was to bridge the gap between the sales departments and our efforts — opening a clear line of communication.
From there, we created dynamic dashboards that fed live data from all marketing outputs (or at least that we could track) into a single space for all to view.
If you know anything from most companies, bridging sales and marketing is a tough journey sometimes as both provide value to the company, but the actual results can be mystifying as to who actually made the sale.
The answer in most cases — yes. They both helped.
With this data, we began to piece together a journey of understanding how the customer engaged the brand and began to operate from that clarity, making budget changes and operational adjustments much smoother.
It also made it easier to adjust within a company that had 50+ years of culture, structure and heritage — IE killing sacred cows is easier when you have data to back you up…
All in all, our team is still on the journey with this multi-year change, and can confidently say that we’ve 6–7 X’ed every dollar they spend digitally. Exciting!
If you are in the same boat and have questions, email us at office@animusdigital.co or take a look at our agency site — animusdigital.co — for more information. I’d love to connect with you.
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