Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too (Revisiting Marketing Basics)

Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too (Revisiting Marketing Basics)

Oct 1, 2021 | Research, Strategy

More than 12 years ago a Marketing Professor claimed business owners should look at their business as a layered cake. She did this in a late evening lecture with more than 100 hungry people.

“Advertising is just icing on the cake” she said.

She went on to explain the age old idea of Kotler’s 4Ps of marketing. She went on to say that without the first three layers – product, price, placement, no advertising campaign, no matter how creative, could guarantee ROMI.

Fast forward to today. Her words come to mind each time a stakeholder asks for an advertising campaign without them having a go to market strategy with business goals and marketing objectives. They expect the icing on the cake to be enough and replace all the other layers. But it doesn’t. All good cooks will tell you that if the first layer – the product, in our scenario, is too soft, all the layers on top of it will succomb and the heavy icing will come tumbling down on your plate because it is too heavy.

Now the analogy makes more sense than ever.

If you put all your efforts into the ad campaign, but you do not develop the product to be a good market fit, with the right pricing and and the right moment for promotion, as well as placement of your product, ads will not do anything for you. I cannot do anything for you as a social advertising professional. You as a business owner cannot blame me or the marketing channel for this.

What can you do? Work on the product, price and placement, of course. AND share all of that know-how with me. That way the icing I create can work to enhance everything that you built, not become too expensive or complicated for the layers supposed to support its weight.

Here’s a top of mind list of questions that might help some of you create your cake and eat it, too:

  • What is SO special about your product/solution? Why would someone buy it? Why wouldn’t they?
  • What are the direct & indirect competitors and what is the added value your product/solutions bring?
  • Where and to whom do you want to sell? Are there any specificities that you need to understand? How about your advertising team, do they understand?
  • Where can people buy your product? In what conditions? Online/offline? Discounts available? Partnerships?
  • I you only sell online. how good is your website? How is the user experience with your website? (Unfortunately, far too often websites load way too slow, do not provide much needed prodyct info, do not engage and convince them of why they should trust the brand and products)

That’s it. My quick Friday rant down memory lane. Hope it helps someone out there. It definitely helped me vent. Now, let me go eat some real cake. 🙂

I Got Addicted To Shark Tank AUS YT Account. This Is What I Learned As A Marketer And Freelancer.

Mar 17, 2021 | Research, Strategy

  1. B2B or B2C? Who makes the sale? If the company you are working with as a freelancer is in a licensing deal, their marketing will look very different from a DTC company.
  2. Local is NOT global. Be aware of the verbiage and the local interpretations in your brand and product name. Do research to confirm you do not have similar brands/products out there. Leverage social listening and basic Google/Bing search. Basic, but important. Do not invest in brand building until you have trademarks.
  3. Patents? Crucial, especially for retail brands. Unless you own a patent your brand’s point of difference will be down the drain fast. Very fast. It will become a race to the bottom of the production cost: who can produce it faster and cheaper? And who has the better network?
  • Lesson for marketing freelancers: make sure you understand if the brand you work for has patents/is different from others in a substantial way. If they do and you help them build their brand, that particular brand will be considerably more valuable if they have a patent for 5-10 years compared to no patent at all.
  • Lesson for entrepreneurs: try to get that patent before you secure investment. That way you have leverage and can get a better valuation.

Do you want to work with a tech startup? Ask them if one of the key stakeholders is a techie (thanks for this one, Steve!). If that’s not the case, the startup risks losing a lot of money outsourcing very expensive tech. Them burning through that cash might end up hurting their bottom line and, as a direct result, your collaboration with them – they will not have marketing dollars if they do not have a great product.

I think I just had to write all of this down for my own sake. Hope it helps someone else out there.

And if you want, binge watch Shark Tank AUS and learn something on your own.

(Digital Tool Of The Week) FanPageKarma For Social Media Marketing Competitor Review

(Digital Tool Of The Week) FanPageKarma For Social Media Marketing Competitor Review

Jul 28, 2020 | Research

Good digital tools don’t pop up on my radar so often, especially not ones I’d recommend full-hearted. FanpPage Karma did. I found it a few weeks ago, I use it and I can recommend it for free of charge competitor reviews.

This social media marketing tool is not new on the market, as old as 2012, but I, for one, never tested it. I found it for a project I had where my client didn’t have access to any competitor review tool. And, of course, for a one time project, they were not willing to invest in a tool. Maybe some of you out there know what I am talking about.

Who Can Use FanPage Karma

Everyone and anyone, of course. But I believe that it’s best suited for small businesses, NGOs, or freelancers. Why? Because of the cost and a very short learning curve.

What does it track

Four of the big social media platforms ou there: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube. Unfortunately, LinkedIn does not allow tracking competitors in this tool, you can only track your own assets.

There is a caveat. For Facebook/Instagram you need to log in with your Facebook account and give the tool permissions to access one of your accounts. I used an older Facebook page I know is not that active, but be aware that you need to decide if that’s something you are comfortable with.

Once you add the social accounts you want to track it will pull up data visualizations and analysis you can leverage to get to the relevant insights.

What You Get With The Free Version Of FanPage Karma

As I already mentioned, I leveraged this tool for a competitor review I had no budget for. I expect a lot of you, social media marketers out there, fiound yourselves in a similar situation. Am I right? FanPage Karma served this purpose.

What exactly are you getting with the free version?

  • one customized Analytics dashboard
  • access for one user
  • 1 month of historic data

Pretty sweet deal if I may say so! This is how my dashboard looks like.

FanPage Karma dashboard

Let’s Test It Out

Whenever I do come across a new tool I want to test out what it can actually do. No muss, no fuss, let’s put this one to the test and you decide for yourself it’s something worth investigating for your own projects.

I want to look at the top 17 airlines in US & Canada for April – May of 2020 and answer a series of questions:

  1. what channel is preferred by airlines? I will look at the activity overview: the number of posts and engagements/post to see what’s the favorite there
  2. what content did they put up and on what topic? Can I identify a trend using the data?

Fanpage Karma provides the following metrics:

  • Network
  • Posts per day
  • Average Weekly Growth
  • Page Performance Index
  • Fans
  • Total Reactions, Comments, Shares
  • Number of Likes
  • Sum of reach of single posts
  • Engagement
  • Growth (absolute)
  • Number of posts
  • Number of Comments
  • Post interaction

You can export the data and start massaging it to get an overall view. Here are the conclusions I got to.

–> Airlines post most often on Twitter, even if engagement/post on that channel was the lowest

—> Top engaged brands by channel (engagements/post)

  • Instagram: United (17,000 engagements/post), Delta Airlines (15,500 engagements/post) and Southwest (13,400 engagements/post)
  • Facebook: Southwest (6,409 engagements/post), Delta Airlines (4,350 engagements/post) and Westjet (4,130 engagements/post)
  • LinkedIn: Delta (3,140 engagements/post), United Airlines (1,660 engagements/post) and Southwest (1,360 engagements/post)
  • Twitter: Aeromexico (80 engagements/post), Air Canada (17 engagements/post) and Westjet (16 engagements/post)

And then I asked myself: what exactly is driving engagement? So I checked the data again. Pnce again, I exported data from FanPage Karma, looked at the top 1,000 posts and tagged them by topic. The metrics you can look at are:

  • Date
  • Message
  • Network
  • Page
  • Post interaction
  • Link

The results are interesting.

FanPage Karma graph trends

I would have expected content on safety protocols related to COVID-19 to get more engagement because a lot of flights were canceled and the topic was hot on the public agenda. But apparently, brands chose to strengthen brand messaging and communicate on brand values and corporate sponsorship, along with corporate responsibility programs supporting local communities affected by the pandemic. Check out some of the top posts below,

To sum up, I believe this is a good tool to do quick competitor reviews and look at social content to not only see what is the priority for other brands in your industry, but also what channel and what topic the audience engages with more.

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