Get Your House in Order Before Advertising Or How to Not Burn Your Cash

There is a proper way to build a fire. Back when I didn't understand that, I abused the chafing fuel and Zippo fluid to get the fire going. There is nothing like the rush of flashing fire when we introduce an accelerant. I used a lot of gel or liquid fuel before I learned how a proper fire is lit.

I see my abuse of fuel across this community, but in a different domain – digital advertising.

It seems, typically, members of our community abuse digital advertising, especially in social media, to get a quick fire going. But unfortunately, as I learned from my misadventures in barbecue, it doesn't work like that. Adding that chafing fuel to an improper fire setup is just a recipe for disaster.

Very much so, like adding dollars to our Facebook ads account to start a fire.

Don't get me wrong – I am not against the responsible use of paid media. On the contrary, I know that it can benefit us immensely. But there are more fundamental things we need to sort out before we drink from that glass.

Those fundamentals are target publics, messaging, and customer journey models at the very least. And when we sort those bare minimums out, it is generally better to start from owned media, expand into earned media and finally add paid media to make sure we are not burning resources.

Target Publics

Our Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is made up of our target customers. But our target publics are not only our target customers. There are also people who influence our target customers, and peripheral target publics that we want to influence, like key opinion holders and journalists.

Before even thinking about how to talk, we have to have at least a theoretical definition of these target publics. Note the theoretical part – before we verify assumptions with data, our definitions are all theoretical. We don't yet know if these people exist at all.

It is important to collect our assumptions (and later collected and confirmed data) in decision-oriented dossiers – like ideal customer profiles, personas, or customer avatars. It is best to not do this with a template downloaded from the internet. The essential point of these documents is to help decision-making about how to speak (or write), channels to prefer, creatives to create, types of content, and similar.

Messaging

After we understand who we are speaking with, our logical next step is figuring out how. That is messaging. But it is not just the text in our ad copy or blog posts. It is our brand positioning, it is our key messages, it is our unique selling proposition, and it is our offer.

Since we have a basic understanding of our target publics (and therefore the components of our target market) we can now position the brand to reflect our promise. Seth Godin talks about this in This is Marketing, with a focus on perceptual maps. To summarize his point:

The local music teacher has multiple attributes that are irrelevant to their positioning, like: "I'm local", "I'm pretty good at teaching" and "I won't yell at your kid". These are attributes of every other local music teacher.

Rather they should use, "I'm serious, my studends are serious, and this is about rigor" and "My students win competitions." It is not for everyone but it is for a specific group of people.

Another teacher might use "This is about experience" and "Practice is about connection and generosity."

As long as our preferred attributes align with a certain group of people across your publics, we are good – better than good. Positioning is not about what we do, but it is about what and who we do it for.

This kind of thinking about our positioning also helps us generate the unique selling proposition and the offer. I am sure we can generate both the USP and the offer from the above statements. Let me give you an example from the first option: USP is “You will win competitions”, and the offer would look like “one on one private lessons, more than 4 hours a week, priced at this premium”.

Here is a thought exercise: How does the perceptual maps of Miyagi-Do and (Johnny's) Cobra Kai differs from each other. In the end, they are two “businesses” that are providing the same kind of “service”.

Customer Journey Models

Another fundamental that's ready before I am thinking about paid media at all is the customer journey model. From where I stand, it doesn't matter if we want to use a tried-and-true AIDA funnel, a more modern customer journey map or even a state-of-the-art marketing flywheel model.

The important part is to have a working model of different stages of a customer's lifecycle. These could start as theory, but it is better if we model these after some publics research. But don't let the good be the enemy of done, if a theory is all we got, start with it and test it.

An essential pointer that I make around this is, typically people just focus on defining the stages and activities the customer have in those defined stages. And it is alright, we should know those, it is 101. But when a journey model becomes indispensable is when we start to understand the interaction between the stages. The conversion rate between each. When we have that, we would know how much traffic is needed to generate to have a single paying customer. And also, it unlocks so many opportunities to improve every stage of our marketing, it would blow your mind.

Now, the above I noted are not the only fundamentals that a business should have. But the bare minimum to have before starting utilizing the paid media. And even after we have these fundamentals, we should focus on the other two types of media before pushing into paid.

Owned Media

Owned media is like your fortress. This can be your website, blog, corporate newsletter, apps, print magazine, display windows and similar. It is what you own, where you have full control over. Commonly, this is where the conversion happens. Therefore, usually, you try to drive people to your owned channels.

Owned media is where the middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel action happens. This is where we can bring in the big guns and deliver longer, more in-depth materials to our later-stage publics. But also, eventually, with some good SEO strategy, it can also unlock a top-of-the-funnel functionality, serving early-stage publics.

Why do we prioritize owned media above all else? It is not just about control over experience or data-access or direct touchpoints, but because without your owned channels, you can't exactly convert, like, at all. Good owned locations are like the foundations that you build other types of media on.

Sometimes people include your social media accounts on the owned media too. But since you can't reach to your followers fully in the age of algorithmic social, it can't be considered owned. It is something else.

Earned Media

Earned media is probably what you traditionally call “the media”, “pick up” or “coverage” – press, blogs, TV and radio, even key opinion leaders. But I don't mean wire syndication. When I refer to earned media, I focus on specific pitches, instead of the spray and pray method that is releasing a press release.

Earned media is great for top-of-the-funnel level or awareness stage activities. It helps us spread our message further than our immediate reach, very similar to paid media. What earned media has above paid is, as you have guessed it, that it is free (as in beer). But it comes with a “catch”: we need to be interesting to earn that media.

Being news-worthy, attaching our offer to a peg or generally playing into the zeitgeist helps us to earn that. But they are not the only way. Mainly, aligning affinity between the media that we are trying to earn, and our message would help us immensely here. Meaning, we should not try to pitch product news to a financial outlet – it will fell on deaf ears.

Nonetheless, ultimately, our story should somehow answer the basic question of “why now?” Otherwise, it won't help us secure that coverage we are looking to get.

And why do we want to prioritize earned media over paid media? Because it helps us to figure out what makes our story share-worthy. Any earned media piece would give hints about what would get interest and word of mouth from our publics. Those hints would help immensely about our messaging around our paid media activities.

Don't Burn Your Cash

As I have said at the start, I am definitely not against paid media. But utilizing the paid media out of the door, without securing your foundations, is like trying to build a fortress on sand. You will just burn very real and critical resources.

I hope that the above would help you to not burn your cash through advertising. Responsible use of paid media is a remarkable tool.

Similar to responsible use of chafing fuel.