Summer is over. My golf game is not much better. My beloved Yankees were unceremoniously dispatched by the Tigers in four. My blog is back. Thanks for waiting.
We work primarily for smaller budgeted brands, those with unique challenges and lofty goals operating on tight budgets. We love the unique challenge of helping these brands and are always up for it.
No doubt, you’ve often heard the expression “when you can’t outspend your competition, outsmart them”. While this makes sense what exactly does outsmart mean? Does it mean come up with clever tactics that allow you to stand out for a short time? Does it mean to carve out a subsegment of the population that you can win and focus with laser-like precision on them? Yes. It does. It means all of these things. But what I think is even more important than outsmarting your competition is outpredicting them.
You can outpredict your competitor by choosing between multiple options based on the best net business outcome. What does that mean? It means develop a series of alternative scenarios and select the one with the best return on investment. What it doesn’t mean is making marketing decisions solely based on achieving more efficient media impressions. Having worked with many companies up against deeper-pocketed competitors I have seen many opt for driving efficiencies on audience metrics rather than productivity on business metrics. Sometimes being less efficient in media is better for your business. We’ve seen it first hand.
We outpredict our client’s competitors by using historical data on sales, awareness, penetration, buying rate, etc. to determine the potential outcomes. While we discuss communication and delivery metrics we consider them leading indicators, not the goal we want to achieve. A little statistical analysis is better than the ordinary demo targeting and reach goals your agency might use. If they’re not asking for more data you’re being hurt. If you have the data, give it to them.
If they don’t know what to do with it, call me.
Diary Of A Media Man 