The Jedi Marketer
The Jedi Marketer
How to optimize your trial-and-error based marketing stack
Let’s begin today with the most common of openings - a question. And the question is- what makes good marketing? Or more simply, what’s good marketing?
In case you are wondering why such a simplistic or irreverent question, here’s why I think this might in reality be layered and important — marketing attribution is still a black-box.
And improper attribution means that there might not be any robust and good criteria of measuring marketing methods to separate the good ones from the bad ones. Except maybe by trial and error followed by some statistical juxtaposing of various campaigns with results and signals.
(Marketing attribution is a black box mostly because of technical limitations, or in the larger picture maybe an inherent property of marketing funnels. This could be a bigger discussion requiring us to solve for a polynomial that has too many fluctuating parameters. Maybe, we will come back to this in a later episode of the Market-ed-it.)
So, what’s good marketing?
Clearly there are a few things that are useful in creating a good marketing stack- a wide tactical knowledge plus strategic experiences. These two are on top of the list along with skills like copywriting, content writing, performance marketing and so on.
Add some awesome marketing tools in the mix from analytics, CDPs, CRMs to data visualization and stitching softwares.
You do this and lo, you are at the cusp of a great marketing stack. You might feel it. And if you run with it, you might see some results. And you would switch and toggle a few of these parameters and try again, till your CAC is few (or many) times lesser than the LTV or your ACV gets a boost. Or you may have a more bottom to top approach using contextual data points for each channel and trying to work out what makes sense in real time. Or you might try a revenue attribution technique and check various statistical models to see what actually makes sense for your business.
All these are scientific ways to measure marketing methods, though almost always empirical. These maybe even effective at times. But at the end of the day, it’s just plain old trial and error.
And if you introspect you will be back to the question we started with ‘What makes a good marketing?’
At this point, let me address this question head on, there is no correct answer to that. Obviously. You know that. But what I am trying to say is that there is a way you can optimize this trial and error formula to create a better marketing stack. There is a secret ingredient, if I may, that you can use to do this. And that secret stuff, could be, possibly, what makes a great marketing stack.
How to optimize trial & error marketing?
Well I will go on and state plainly what I think this ingredient is. It’s ‘understanding’.
And when I say understanding I don’t mean understanding your customers. That’s because it’s fairly difficult to cast your customers as a monolithic ICP. True some of the traits match, but that won’t take us very far except in putting the correct filters in your prospecting tools.
So when I say ‘understanding’ what I mean is understanding your own product, the market (includes competitions, parallel industries, criss-crossing sectors), and maybe, the problem you are solving. Again, just like understanding customers, the problem part may get very complicated very soon, depending upon your product/service.
These three things (product, market & the problem) are the fundamental components of marketing. To throw in an analogy here, if marketing was a Star Wars universe, these three would be the integral elements of the ever elusive and tough-to-master ‘Force’.
And just like one needs to understand and master the Force to become a Jedi, so does a marketer need to understand these three things to create a good marketing stack. And become a Jedi marketer in the process.
How to understand?
Understanding is a thoroughly abstract concept. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as below -
Tricky ain’t it? I would even say these are too simplistic.
But it’s not something as simple as knowing facts or meanings or associations. It’s all that and so much more. And as I said, it’s one of those abstractions that we can ‘understand’ but maybe hard to enunciate. In fact, understanding ‘understanding’ can be a paradoxical adventure at the outer edges of what we think we know.
But one thing is for sure. Understanding is not easy.
In fact, it’s one of the most difficult things to do. But it’s also one of the most human things to do. And that’s why it’s important to ingest this in your marketing strategy. Since you are trying to reach other humans with a proposition at the end of the day.
So I will try to recount some of the existing and opinionated (mine of course) ways of understanding the three things we want to - product or offering, market and the problem.
Let’s dive headlong into it.
Understanding your product/offering
Before you explain your product to your prospects, how well do you understand it yourself? Some pertinent questions here could be-
Do you use your own product/offering?
Is your product a cross-section of many ideas?
A cross section of other products?
If your product has detailed features, do you know how to use or deploy them?
Do you know when not to use your product?
Why is this product important?
What technology/innovation fires your product?
If this product wasn’t available, what would change in the area where it applies?
So on and so forth.
These questions are not the definitive questions to ask or answer. But these will provide a kind of opening into a very introspective look at how your product interacts with you and vice versa. And hopefully you will be able to look at your product with far more understanding.
The idea here is to gauge that interface between your product and its users and not just know what its use-cases are.
Understanding the market
Market is a very broad term and there isn’t a specifc way or attitude to understand it. But here are some traditional things that can help understand this ever-dynamic force of the market-
Learning about competitions and their product/services
Conducting customer research to understand what problem one is solving
Conducting large scale primary and secondary market research
A few things that I would like to add here that can help are-
Understanding horizontal and vertical applications that coincide or graze the envelope of your product’s applications
Learn what are the alternatives to your product are and not just your competitions. Is there a technology that could replace your product?
What market or technology changes are upcoming
What’s the cultural and social impact of your product
Where do folks who buy your product hangout (digitally speaking)
Again, not a definitive list but a prop to help you start your brainstorm.
Understanding the pain point
Understanding the problem you are solving is not easy. It’s the biggest challenge for the marketer to tame.
The point here is to be brutally honest- are you really solving a problem? If you are, there are chances you might be solving more than one problem. In that case, you need to understand each of those separately.
’What makes the problem you are solving a good problem to solve’ is what will nudge folks to buy your product or offering. So dive a layer deeper into the problems you are tackling.
I have written another piece on this exact topic, with a slightly different angle. You can read that here-
Closing it out
It’s been a long newsletter. But I hope you found some useful connects on your way to understanding the Force of markets. Maybe a faint touch or a question, but a connection nonetheless.
Once you have a sense of these important parts of the Force, you will be able to understand your hit and trial results better than any software or algorithm can tell you. Why? Well, let’s say that just like mastering the Force gives powers to a Jedi, so does understanding these details to a marketer. And once you have this understanding, the Force will guide you and your campaigns into better places.
Let me know what you think.
And, may the Force be with you.