R.I.P. Marketing Campaigns. Do THIS Instead.

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

R I P marketing campaigns they are or should be a thing of the past. What should you be doing instead? Well, you'll want to buckle up your seat belt and tune into this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, whew. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody. I am Neal Schaffer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast. If you are new here, well, what the heck is a digital marketing coach, I cover lots of different things. Because if you are a marketer, and entrepreneur, a business owner or a content creator, there's a lot to cover, right. And that's why maybe sometimes I'll talk about influencer marketing may be content marketing, or Facebook or LinkedIn, because we have to cover it all. And as your digital marketing coach, it is my responsibility to keep you educated on what I think based on the questions, I get that my client engagements or what have you, or what I think is most important to talk about at the time. And today is going to be all about something that I'm really passionate about, that I think we really need to change our thinking about, which is marketing campaigns. So marketing campaigns, why do they even exist? Why do they need to go? What do you do instead? And how by doing that, it will fundamentally change your mindset and exponentially improve your marketing is what I want to talk about when I talk about why marketing campaigns have to go now, this came up, because I will be on a webinar very soon, I was invited to like a CMO roundtable webinar. And I got the questions in advance. And one of the questions was Neil, tell me about one of your favorite, you know, let's say content marketing campaigns, and why it was so successful. And it could be, you know, from you or your clients, or could be something you read about in the media. And here's the thing, I don't believe in campaigns, there is nothing to share. And I thought a lot about this. And I thought maybe I'm crazy that I don't have this campaign mindset. Now, I am not a traditional marketer. Like other marketers, I will be very honest and letting you know that I tend to see things in a very, very holistic, business minded way. But I thought about this. And then yesterday, I had a chance to talk to my old friend Joe Polizzi, the godfather of content marketing. And we got to the topic of content marketing campaigns. I'm like, Joe, why do people still think in terms of campaigns? And jogos? Exactly, because the notion of a campaign falls back into that traditional marketing. And it's disruptive in nature, right? It's something that existed before social media. And Joe agreed wholeheartedly with my thoughts on it. And it really gave me the confidence that No, I'm not crazy. And you shouldn't be crazy, either. Because the whole idea of a campaign is, oh, we need to increase our sales, let's do a campaign. And it's really this concept of creating lots of content or advertising. And sort of throwing money at the wall basically is shifting budget into promoting more of something, I think is an easy way to look at it. Now, why I think there aren't campaigns is because I don't think that's effective. Now, there are something called launches, a launch might be considered a campaign, but the idea is you are a new brand, or you're an existing brand and you have a new product. So you need to generate massive brand awareness for this new brand or new product in a limited amount of time. Now I get that scenario, and I get why some people might call that a campaign, but whether it is that or you need to sell more of a product and you want to do something more strategic to promote that product, I would say with either of these scenarios, we are not talking about campaigns. We are talking about experiments. So I teach this class at UCLA Extension on influencer marketing. And I showed this slide which well, if you could see it, I would show it to you but I don't have it handy right now. But anyway, it is called the Deming circle The name of my company is called PDC, a social. And I've talked about this PDCA approach to marketing, I talked about it and maximize your social, which I wrote back in 2013, about the PDCA approach to social media strategy. I talked about it in influencer marketing, it is central, because it is so true and evergreen in its truth. And here it is, right? It's Professor Edwards Deming, he is considered the godfather of quality control. And he created this what's called the Deming circle, which is also called the PDCA circle, I'm gonna explain what that means and why it's important. But he created this as a way to control experiments. The idea is, if you do an experiment, well, you need to have a plan for the experiment, right? You want to achieve certain results. And in order to achieve those results, you need to plan it out. That's the P and PDCA. The D is do and you need to do according to plan, right? It's an experiment, you spent the time planning it out, you don't want to go off the rails and do something completely different. We then have to see which is the check, how did we do? What can we do to perform better, right? And then we have the A which is act, its act upon its optimize, it is a never ending circle of kaizen. And I'm not going to get like esoterical here on you. But I think you understand the Japanese term, which means continuous improvement. So in that scenario, marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, they are all experiments, we do not know how these political campaigns, as many traditional marketers call them are going to perform. Right? We need to have data. So my view of a launch is a launch, we need to gather data, we have no data, we have no idea how much to spend on what platforms, we think we know where our audiences, we think we know what content they may resonate with. But until we do it, we don't know. Right? It's an experiment. And I would say the same thing with what others would call campaigns, I call them experiments. We want to shift budget, and do something big in order to increase sales. What is a better way of thinking about that? It's thinking in the experimental mode. And here's the thing, if you've been doing marketing for your brand, you should have a ton of data across all these different marketing channels, cost per click cost per acquisition, cost per website visit, influencer marketing versus traditional ads, and on and on and on and on. What we now need to do if we want to focus on promoting something big, yes, there needs to be a shift in budget. But we may also need to try something new to see if we can get better results. On behalf of this data driven experiment. Obviously, we're doing our best to optimize our marketing. But it's not enough for whatever objective we have. So we need to do something new. It's not always just doing more often it's doing something different. It's trying a new channel. Well, we're doing tick tock ads, we did Instagram ads. What about Reddit ads, or even within a channel? Well, we're doing meta ads. We're doing images and videos. Let's try carousels. See how that does? Well, let's try a new look alike audience instead of 1%. Let's try 5%. There are a ton of you know, getting back to influencer marketing, every influencer is going to deliver different results. So just looking at the experiment, that is influencer marketing, every influencer delivers different results. every social network, every content medium will deliver different results. Whether you do the work in house, whether you work through an agency, or whether you potentially outsource to influencers, these are all going to give you different results. But it's doing the different experiments in a strategic way and measuring them that will get you to better results than if it's just we're gonna do a campaign. Let's throw money out this and just push a lot of disruptive advertising and content across all the platforms. You might get more eyeballs, but I guarantee you with a data driven approach to all this, you are going to get a much better result. The more data you have, the more you do this, the more channels you experiment with, the more content mediums, the more influencers, the more ad types, the better you get over time, and when social media changes in the platform algorithms change, you'll know it'll say in the data, then you'll need to shift your marketing budget elsewhere. That is really what data driven marketing is. That's why well I need to you know, I need to get more website traffic from my social media posting. So every month this is you know, if you're a small business, right, and you're posting to Pinterest and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, very similar to what I do, and I look month to month with all the changes, not so much in Facebook and LinkedIn. But on Pinterest and Twitter. or Pinterest the decline of static pins. Twitter? Well, Elon Musk, it's definitely impacted the platform. So on a month to month basis, well, how is my traffic from all these social media sites doing if I haven't changed what I do there? Right? And what is the quality of that traffic? And then how many conversions do I get from that traffic. And I can tell you, Twitter, for me is still number one. But Pinterest has dropped from a number two, to number four, it used to always be above LinkedIn, and Facebook. So now, maybe I do a little bit less on Pinterest, and the time and resources that I get, I can shift elsewhere. It is data driven. And that is what I want to get across to you that don't think about campaigns, think experiments with this mindset, you're gonna get more variety, and more data that when utilized properly, will impact your marketing at an exponential level more than this short term, memory type of campaign, which is on the day gone tomorrow, this is all evergreen, we're always optimizing it as PDCA. Remember that circle of Kaizen, and that will deliver better results for your marketing and for your business. All right, well, that concludes another exciting episode of the digital marketing coach, podcast next week. We have that godfather of content marketing, just talked about Joe Pulizzi. We have a fascinating conversation. I encourage you if you have not done so yet, to hit that subscribe button, tell your friends, write a review. Get excited. I'm excited, right? My voice is going hearts here. I'm so excited. But regardless, the other thing I wanted to tell you is make sure that if you're on YouTube, to subscribe to my channel, I am starting to livestream these podcasts recordings, whether it is a solo, or whether I'm doing an interview. If you want to hear the podcast before it appears on the podcast, and maybe a little bit extra q&a at the end. Make sure you check out youtube.com/neal Schaffer go to the Live tab and you'll be able to see these and you'll be able to see my upcoming live stream schedule and you'll be able to press a notify button so that you can get notified when I do the live stream. How frickin magical is that? Right? Okay, I'll stop there. This has been another episode of this podcast. I really truly enjoy serving you. And I look forward to the next episode. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the shownotes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.