Which Marketing Strategy is Most Effective?
Understanding Strategy
Growing a business requires two types of marketing strategies: Overarching Marketing Strategy and Message Strategy.
1. Overarching Marketing Strategy
This is the big picture—a plan that considers the nuances of your business, industry, customer behavior, and buying style. It’s about reducing friction for customers and identifying and alleviating your customers’ fears.
2. Message Strategy
Once the overarching marketing strategy is in place, the message strategy focuses on crafting the best words to build an emotional connection with your audience; often, through story.
Part 1: Why You Need an Overarching Marketing Strategy
Running a business without a marketing strategy is like embarking on a road trip without a map. You might eventually get where you’re going, but the journey will likely be longer, more expensive, more stressful, and full of unhelpful detours.
A good marketing strategy answers three essential questions:
1. What should you say?
2. Where should you say it?
3. How and how often should you say it?
Here are a few foundational questions when building your marketing strategy:
- Can you stimulate demand?
- Can you reach the customer easily at the time of purchase?
- Can you win the customers heart before they need what you offer?
- Can you use media to efficiently target the customer?
- Should you do direct response or branding style messaging?
- Is trust important? What contributes to trust?
- Do we target Transactional or Relational shoppers?
Since this is a blog and not a book, I’ll just speak to a few of these questions and if you want more guidance you can email me at MattWillis@WizardOfAds.com
Can you stimulate demand?
Purchases are either triggered by an external event or an internal desire.
For example, a plumbing company cannot convince a homeowner to hire them to fix a sink that isn’t broken. And a moving company cannot convince a homeowner to move.
The goal of businesses who sell products/services that are externally triggered is not stimulating demand but ensuring customers think of you first and like you the best when the triggering event occurs.
For products with internal triggers—those driven by emotions, desires, or ego—you can actively stimulate demand. This requires addressing three key points:
Why they should buy
Why they should buy now
Why they should buy from you
A few more examples to drive this home
An engagement ring is an externally triggered purchase
A Rolex is internally triggered.
Shoes can either be internally or externally triggered based on the customer. Some customers could be internally triggered to buy Air Jordans, while other customers could be externally triggered when the hole in the sole of their shoe gives way to pavement.
Can you use media to efficiently target your customer?
Customers often turn to Google during their “Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT). If they don’t already know or trust you, you’ll be competing with others who are willing to pay top dollar for leads. The solution? Reach them before they get to Google.
Media generally falls into two categories: Targeted Media and Mass Media
Targeted media: narrow reach at a higher cost
Mass media: broad reach at a lower cost
Targeted Media
Targeted media (like PPC, search ads on specific sites, some direct mail etc) tends to be much more expensive than mass media on a per impression basis and serves a different purpose.
Purpose 1: Capture leads who are ready to buy
Since bottom-of-funnel, targeted media like PPC is expensive, it’s wise to become decreasingly dependent on unbranded keywords as you reach your first few million in revenue. Instead, focus on building relationships with mass media, then capture lease with branded keywords which tend to cost only a few cents per click.
Below are industry benchmarks for PPC. Note, only a fraction of these will ever convert.
Purpose 2: Engage a very narrow subset of the population
Can you create a quality, cost-effective list of every person who could conceivably buy what you sell? If “yes” leveraging targeted media could be a great approach.
If you serve multiple industries, have multiple decision makers and/or influencers, targeting efforts become impractical.
Sidenote: if you have a great list broker, please let me know. From my experience, buying lists are not worth the money which makes building a list remarkably labor intensive/expensive.
Is social media a form of targeted media?
In 2022, Meta (Facebook & Instagram) settled with the DOJ over accusations of their targeting leading to discrimination. To prevent fines and further legal trouble, social media companies no longer effectively target, thus making them function more like expensive mass media than targeted.
Mass Media
If you can feasibly sell your product/service to a base that’s too diverse or large to build a list, mass media can be a great option. Even though it will reach people beyond your customer base, it’s cost effective enough that it makes sense to reach those who influence your buyers too.
For example, a funeral home would typically do well to skip the Pre-need/funeral planning mailers targeting senior citizens, instead opting for mass media for a few reasons.
While each mailer would cost between $1.50 to $5+ per person, radio (for example) can reach the same person 3x/week all year for less than $1.
Funeral decisions are typically made with the influence of a spouse and/or family. While a flyer only reaches the decision maker (maybe), radio can influence all parties.
Radio can keep the funeral home top of mind all year, a mailer isn’t likely to keep them top of mind longer than it takes to get to the wastebasket.
Here’s how the cost to reach 1,000 people compares across multiple medias according to Audacy.
Yes, you read that right, while you could target one lead, one time via PPC for $6.96 in the home service industry, you could alternatively reach 1,000 people for 40 cents with radio!
With such a vast price difference, you can see why mass media even makes sense as a primary media for marketing businesses with a semi-narrow niche.
Should you do direct response or branding style messaging?
Direct response marketing focuses on generating immediate action, whether to purchase or reach out. It requires a compelling offer with scarcity and/or urgency to be effective. Direct response marketing can be effective for Internally Triggered purchases as the offer can give the customer added reason to buy now. It is less effective for external triggers.
If you cannot come up with a strong offer that aligns with the customers trigger, is scarce and/or urgent and doesn’t compromise your product or service, then direct response marketing is probably not for your business.
Branding, on the other hand, builds long-term trust and loyalty. By creating an emotional connection, you ensure that customers choose you before even considering competitors.
Branding is a great way to avoid competing on price and to maintain high margins
You can learn more about these two messaging styles in this article.
By answering these 7 questions you’ll have the components to create a phenomenal strategy, telling you where and how to market.
The next step is creating a message strategy that will capitalize on what you learned in your overarching marketing strategy to ensure maximum impact.
Part 2: Message Strategy
Even the best marketing strategy can falter without a strong message. Think of a strong message strategy as a sharp chainsaw that makes cutting through the noise easier, faster, and more effective.
So what is message strategy and how do you create it?
If you read “The Art of War”, the renown book on wartime strategy by Sun Tzu, thinking you’ll learn THE strategy to win any war… you’ll be disappointed. Instead Sun Tzu gives us principles based on:
What do you have to work with?
What has worked in the past (across time and contexts)?
What unrealized opportunities you may have?
Knowing the principles and these three questions, you can create an optimal wartime strategy no matter your circumstances.
Message strategy is much the same.
A good message strategist - like a wartime strategist, will start by asking, “what do we have to work with?” To share a few examples:
On the flip side…
The results of assessing “what do we have to work with?” will yield 2 primary categories of insights: Challenges and Opportunities.
You fix challenges and capitalize on opportunities in similar fashion.
Remember Sun Tzu’s approach to strategy?
What has worked in the past (across time and contexts)
What unrealized opportunities may we have
In business, we use the same concepts, but with different names:
Business Problem Topology
Unleveraged Assets
Business Problem Topology is the process of overcoming challenges or implementing opportunities by looking at examples from other businesses and industries.
For example, Henry Ford reduced the time to produce a car by 90% by reverse engineering the pig disassembly line as the assembly line for his cars… that was Business Problem Topology.
Identifying Unleveraged Assets allows you to turn hidden strengths into competitive advantages.
An example of this is a B2B client of mine who moves heaven and earth to satisfy their customers. By turning what they’re already doing into a guarantee, they can stand out from the competition while easing the fears of potential customers. That’s Identifying an Unleveraged Asset
To begin implementing Business Problem Topology and Identifying Unleveraged Assets effectively, study what’s worked in the past and why.
Once you know “why” you can implement with confidence as you’ll have the “why” as a guiding principle.
When my business partner, Roy Williams, was looking to endear the public to an HVAC company, he identified that Dewey Jenkins had similar personality traits as Andy Griffith. Since he knew Andy Griffith and Barney Fife’s relationship was endeared by the public, he created similar characters in their marketing campaigns. It worked. Charlotte, North Carolina fell in love with “Mr. Jenkins & Bobby” and the company exploded from $15m to over $100m. That’s Business Problem Topology AND Identifying an Unleveraged Asset!
“Strategy is using the past to predict what will work in the present”
If you don’t know what has (or hasn’t) worked in the past, how will you avoid wasting time and money on things destined to fail?
If you don’t know how to leverage what you have to stand above your competitors, how will you grow?
The Wizard of Ads Partners have learned these and many other principles while growing many hundreds of businesses from a few million in revenue to $50m+.
Everything here is learnable, and the Wizard of Ads trilogy by Roy Williams is a great place to start. If you’d like a free digital copy of the books or want to discuss how to build a strategy for your business, email me at MattWillis@WizardOfAds.com
