When things are going well it can be difficult to get the creative juices flowing and come up with your next brilliant move to expand your business’s marketing plan. Today, I’ll outline a few things that “past you” can do to make “future you” look like a genius with minimal effort.
Keep track of your tangents
Meetings can be an excellent petri dish for brainstorming. Don’t discount yours, or anyone else’s, thoughts around “what would be really great.”
Pipe dreams lead to the oil field of success.
Try to get into the habit of writing everything down and having an organizational system for recalling those great thoughts. You may not have the budget for it now but, once you’ve gathered enough gems to compound into a total strategy, your boss/client won’t have an excuse not to allocate you some of those sweet, sweet, marketing dollars.
Do the leg work
Ideas are only the starting point. Once you have enough to get you excited and ready to fight for that budget you have to build up your artillery. Make time to research and become well acquainted with what you’re pitching. You don’t necessarily need to sandbox it and become a total expert, but start finding the answers to your questions and questions that your boss/client might ask. Here’s an example:
We wanted one of our clients to start using LinkedIn Lead Ads to we can leverage the autofill capability. We knew that they integrate with a compliance team who wants us to be successful and likes the creative approaches that are out there but have a responsibility to the company to keep everything legal and worded properly. Before assuming compliance will say no to this idea we researched and found as much information as we could around the process of setting up lead forms, how to apply our own legal language/terms & conditions and a full walkthrough of what the user journey is.
Think from the perspective of the outsiders. Even though your plan won’t affect every department personally it can reach them tangentially.
If you solve problems before they happen you’ll be more likely to garner confidence in your plan.
Build Projection Models
I won’t lie to you, projections are not my favorite. I see the value in being able to estimate future success but I always take time to point out that you have to take these numbers with a big grain of salt. After all, a pandemic could happen.
That said, budget projections help prove your point with numbers and they aren’t terribly difficult to estimate. My approach is to determine industry or vertical benchmarks (like CTR or CPC) and reverse engineer Clicks or Impressions by dividing cost. Keep in mind that you should still account for your campaigns’ historical benchmarks, impression share/SOW, click share, and audience size for any platform you’re working in. If the audience is only 1,000 members it’s unrealistic to project 1,000,000 clicks.
Averaging industry, historical, and vertical benchmarks can help set realistic KPIs to project off of and work toward.
Here are a few suggestions on how to get benchmarks:
- Talk to your platform reps
- Pull average metrics from your account for a timeframe that makes sense
- Ex: While updating benchmarks for one of my accounts I chose to average metrics from Feb-May because their new website launched in February and I didn’t want the data from the old website to skew my future numbers.
- Read blogs/Google it
- Stay updated in recent events and how they impact your marketing strategy
- Ex: Check out PPC Hero’s Paid Media Pulse COVID 19 Dashboard
If you’re having trouble getting started, put on some Barenaked Ladies and ask yourself “if I had a million dollars…”? Without excuses and constraints, you might just find your next great idea.
