What is in your marketing supply chain? Something that occurred to me earlier this year was that marketing has a supply chain and it is not the companies that make marketing technology. No, our supply chain as marketers are the suppliers that deliver the raw materials we work with to make our products. As marketers, our product is typically marketing or sales qualified leads that we give to our buyers - the sales process in our organization. Whether it is an automated shopping cart doing ecommerce transactions or a sales representative calling leads or a retail store attracting walk-in prospective customers, our buyers take our outputs.
Start Your Automated Online Business Here
And what’s our input? What’s the supply we buy? Audience attention. We purchase audiences’ attention from suppliers, and with our marketing operations, we refine that attention and pass the refined product down to our buyers. Sometimes we pay money outright for our raw materials, as we do when we pay to run ads. Other times, we’re bartering for our raw materials, as we do when we create content for organic search. Does that make sense so far? It aligns with what we call marketing operations, the execution of our marketing strategy to move our company forward and to serve the customer all along the customer’s journey to being a valued member of our community. Now, to be clear, this is not what the customer sees or experiences. This is what is happening behind the scenes in the world of marketing.
One of the questions people often ask about attribution analysis is, “So what? What does this tell us? What good is this information?” When we talk about attribution reports, we often talk about what is working, how to know if our marketing is working. Consider this mindset shift though: An attribution report is an analysis of your marketing supply chain. Instead of telling you only about your marketing performance, an attribution analysis also tells you about the state and health of your marketing supply chain.
More importantly your marketing may not be responsible for a supplier underperforming. For example, in the real world, if all your company’s goods are stuck on a cargo container ship stranded off a coast, all the marketing and sales efforts in the world won’t restock your shelves. In fact, they may make things worth by creating demand for which you don’t have supply to fulfill. Likewise, when you look at your attribution reports, you’re seeing what suppliers are sending you the attention of audiences.
You see what your raw supplies look like - and with that mindset, you know which suppliers themselves might be in trouble if you are not getting enough supply. For paid ads, advertising networks have done a great job of convincing us as marketers that any problems are our fault - bad creative, bad setup, etc.
And that is certainly not out of the question; we have all see our share of terrible ads. But ad networks themselves don’t talk about the quality of their supply, of the quality of attention they sell to us - and yet that is what an attribution report is also telling us. The next time you look at an attribution analysis, remember this key point: you are not just looking at your marketing performance. You are looking at the quality of marketing suppliers in your supply chain. Once you think of attribution that way, your mind is open to thinking about where else, what other suppliers you could swap in to get the same raw materials your marketing needs to generate the products your buyers and prospects are waiting for.
I thought the major trends would be over the next couple of years, what marketers should plan for. I can't speak for anyone else, but I see three strategic imperatives that inform my plans for the next three years. Disclaimer: when we're talking about the funnel, I am specifically referring to our marketing operations funnel, the order of operations we use to conduct marketing internally. The customer journey may be non-linear, but our org charts are not. Top of the funnel: brand, brand, brand.
A recent paper by the folks at LinkedIn's B2B Institute states that only 2-5% of our target market are actual buyers at any given time. Recall I don't particularly believe in the arbitrary division of B2B/B2C - there's only complex and simple sales. A mortgage looks more like a "B2B sale", and buying a simple SaaS service on your credit card looks more like a "B2C sale". If we're spending all our time and effort on trying to persuade people to buy who aren't in the buying cycle, we're pissing away our budget and resources.
So, what's the alternative? Spending on brand. Spending on share of mind. Investing in attention, awareness, and ideally enrollment in some kind of marketing program that allows us to stay in touch. And I don't just mean spending hard dollars, this includes soft dollars as well - guest appearances on podcasts, guesting on live streams, showing up in other people's books - you name it, if it puts me in front of a new audience, it's fair game. Middle of the funnel: publishing. Not necessarily for purchase, but doubling down on a robust publishing program, a content marketing program that helps me to stay in touch with you. This newsletter. A new offering on YouTube coming soon. Finding new ways to provide you value, to reinforce the brand promise I'll be working on building in the top of the funnel.
But above all else, creating a robust publishing platform that I own, so that I am less beholden to big tech social networks and search engines as much as practical and realistic (they will continue to be a major part of the mix, let's be honest). What can I do to earn my way into someone's inbox, in their ears, on their coffee table, into their weekly routine? That, by the way, is the principal reason I publish a weekly newsletter - you have 52 opportunities a year to remind people you exist, instead of what most people do, which is a monthly newsletter that gets you only 12 opportunities a year. Bottom of the funnel: community building.
Again, for what I do, the buying cycle may be once or twice a year. That means for the rest of the time, I need the ability to interact with people without the pressure - on both our parts - of trying to sell to them. The community in my Analytics for Marketers Slack group is exactly this kind of community, a place where people can hang out and chat about work-related and life-related stuff. Community is the natural and logical extension of influencer marketing except that instead of focusing on one or a select handful of individuals, you grow a community of influencers. And they don't have to be big names or loud mouths; they simply need to be part of organizations that eventually buy whatever your products or services are. If you earn your way into the minds and hearts of people on, say, the vendor selection committee at your target companies/industry, that's real, bottom-line influence.
Again, to the greatest extent possible, we want to own our community relationships and have them be as algorithm and model free as possible. That's one of the reasons I avoid places like LinkedIn Groups and Facebook Groups. You're competing with every other post in the News feed for attention. When you are in Slack or Discord or other similar software, it is unfiltered - what people post is what people see. Why these three rather bland, almost painfully obvious strategies? Where is the sexy stuff? Well, part of the sexy stuff is in the implementation, but the reality is these three strategies are more resistant to the blindingly obvious changes coming to advertising and marketing, mainly in the form of privacy restrictions. Experienced Facebook advertisers have already felt the impact of reduced targeting options making ads cost more and deliver fewer results. Experienced display advertisers have long felt the pain of reduced tracking capabilities as more browsers drop support for third-party cookies. More privacy, less data, and more restricted marketing technology means we have to move away from targeting customers to embracing customers. As my friend and partner John
Wall says, any time you are using military or hunting words to describe your customers, it says a lot about what you think of them. These three strategies are the beating heart of building actual, true relationships with customers, and in the end, they are sustainable and profitable over the long-term. What are your strategies for the next few years, given the telegraphed landscape changes in marketing? What's On My Mind: Reactive and Proactive Content Creation What kind of content creator are you? I view content creation through one of two lenses, reactive and proactive.
A proactive creator is what we tend to think of when we think of content creation. You sit down at your keyboard or your notepad, the vast, empty expanse before you, and you start creating. You write, you draw, you paint, you compose - where there was nothing, now there is something. Your ideas come through pure, unblemished, exactly as you envisioned in your mind's eye. A reactive creator is someone who needs an input to do the same. Someone asks a question. A situation happens at work. A post passes by as you thumb through your feeds on your phone. Whatever it is, like a spark landing in a pile of tinder, once alight, your creative powers engage and content emerges from the ashes. To be clear, neither type of creator is better than the other.
The end product is content, hopefully good. Each is just a different process for getting to the destination. And we can be either kind of creator on any given day. Some days, we're inspired, other days, we need something to bounce off of. But generally speaking, we tend to have a higher level of comfort with one or the other. Here's where this distinction matters: if the content creation situation is a mismatch for your predisposition. A proactive creator put in a reactive situation is going to be endlessly frustrated. They'll say, I don't want to be answering other people's questions or responding to X influencer's blog post! Just leave me alone and let me do my thing!. They would find always being reactive, never getting to channel their ideas purely to be incredibly aggravating. A reactive creator put in a proactive situation is going to be paralyzed by the empty page. They'll say, What do you mean, just create something? Create what? What does the audience want to know about? What problems are we trying to solve? What's the angle here?
The blank page, with nothing to light that spark, is less a canvas and more a prison. I lean very heavily towards reactive content creation. I thrive in Q&A, in answering questions, in reading about something that leads me down a rathole of interesting side explorations. It is where I am happiest. When I create presentations or trainings for people, I always ask for that spark, that list of questions people have as a jumping off point. I need that mental racquetball match to bring out my best. Can I create from the blank page? Yes. Is it my best work? Not on the first attempt though no and possibly never, because that is not how I work best. Put me on stage in a fireside chat with questions, or give me an hour of presentation time with only 20 minutes of presenting and 40 minutes of Q&A, and I will deliver my best work.
I know this about myself, and to succeed, I try to put myself in the situations that work for me. What works for you? If you, or someone you manage, doesn't know what kind of creation they're best at, then you run the risk of languishing in the wrong environment, in the wrong situation. You're planting a shade-loving plant in direct sun, putting an animal used to noise in deafening silence, creating an environment that stifles instead of supports. Make sure you know what you are and where you flourish best. Bonus Thing On My Mind: BDI Supply chains are going haywire. The third largest port in China, Ningbo, remains closed due to a COVID-19 outbreak. The Panama Canal is closing for two weeks for maintenance. 65% of the US workforce is looking to change jobs. Add this all up and you have supply chain hell, which we see in the Baltic Dry Index, a measure of how much it costs to buy cargo container space on a boat: BDI chart What does this mean? If you need things shipped in Q4, ship sooner than later, because who the heck knows when it will get there. As a consumer, do your holiday shopping now.
Don't be the parent who orders a gift the day after Thanksgiving and finds out it won't be delivered until February. I bought a snow blower last month. Why? Because when I need it this winter, I'm pretty certain it won't be available. Stay ahead of supply chain problems - order early and stock up before any crunches hit what you need. Some food for thought. This past week, I was working with my friends at Demandbase (who also kindly sponsored this issue of the newsletter) to publish some content promoting their new DBTV platform, and I had queued up social posts on Twitter and LinkedIn in advance of the launch on Tuesday. All the posts went out in sync with their launch on Tuesday. Launch day statistics and yet, the posts got the most attention in terms of views and interactions... the next day.
Why? Because the underlying models that power the newsfeeds on these social networks don't especially care about our timing. They don't care when we, the marketers, want people to see our stuff. They serve up our content - if at all - when they think people want to see it. And that's based on the architecture of the models themselves and what they're designed to value. For example, both Twitter and LinkedIn have published extensive technical data and research on how their models work. When we unpack the technical language, we can boil down the technical factors into a few major buckets: interaction strength, relevancy of topic, and probability of engagement. Interaction strength is how engaged you and your network are. If you just blindly post into the ether, and you don't have real conversations with other people, you have no interaction strength with others and thus your content won't be seen by them. Interaction strength is the origin of the popular tactic of tagging as many people in your posts as you possibly can.
Relevancy of topic uses the state of the art natural language processing models to determine how topically relevant your content is to your audience's interests. LinkedIn in particular has trained its own version of the BERT language model specifically on LinkedIn member interactions, and tries to show topically relevant content to members. Probability of engagement is the predictive aspect of these feed models, the set of algorithms attempting to guess what will keep people most engaged, most interested. Recommendations are shown based on these probability estimates. What's not in here? Yup, you guessed it: timeliness. These models are all looking at how relevant and engaging our content is, and if we are not as strong as other entities competing for our audience's eyeballs, then our stuff will get shown later, after the better-scoring content has been consumed by our audience.
In practice, that means that while I may publish my content on a specific day, it won't necessarily be seen or recommended on that day. I'm sure you've had the experience of publishing something on a social network and suddenly seeing interaction on it days later, long after you've forgotten about it. So, what does this mean for us? When we're designing our marketing campaigns, we cannot count on the timing of marketing channels we don't own. We can count on emails to go out on a specific day. We can count on text messages to be broadcast at our design. We can count on publishing a post to our blog when we want. We cannot count on social networks showing our content at a specific time. We cannot even necessarily count on ad campaigns being delivered when we want, if our targeting and spend isn't optimum.
In short, if you don't own it, you can't count on timing it. If you need to show results on a specific time, focus on the channels you own and invest most heavily in those. A quick note before we get to this week's content. I just upgraded my marketing automation software and changed servers.
The marketing automation server and platform I've been running this newsletter on is now five years old. There have been three major operating system updates since I deployed the server, and two major releases of the software. Nostalgic look inside a server And... I've updated none of it until now, until today. Why? In the days before Trust Insights, my personal newsletter was more or less a hobby. In the years since the founding of my company, my focus has always been on the company and its infrastructure first, so this newsletter's back end systems never got the love and attention that they should have. What this creates is what consultants call technical debt. Like financial debt, technical debt is what accumulates when you don't make your payments, or insufficient payments.
In the context of marketing technology, that's keeping systems and processes up to date. You can either steadily maintain things along the way, paying your bills regularly, or you can be called to account at some point and have to settle up a really large bill. My reckoning was a couple of weeks ago, in doing a promotion for a sponsor. It took 23 hours to fully send the promotional announcement out. Why? Because the server and system was so slow that sending a quarter million emails took that long. I almost didn't make the promotion commitment because of technical debt, and I knew I had to settle up. Settling up in this case meant building a new virtual server from scratch, installing all new software, and as you saw above, importing all my data into the new system. We all have technical debt to some degree. Some of it's unavoidable or cost-prohibitive to resolve quickly. For example, we individually have technical debt the moment a new model of our favorite smartphone or computer comes out and we've now got the preceding generation. After a year or two, another model comes out, and suddenly our phone is 3 models behind and doesn't work as well.
That's technical debt. If we can live with it, then it's not a huge problem, but if we find ourselves no longer able to do what we want, or in business we're not able to keep up with competitors, then technical debt is something we have to resolve. Pop quiz: how much technical debt do you have in your marketing technology stack? Do you know? What's the impact of it? What, if anything, aren't you able to do because of it? In business, there are multiple kinds of debts like this. Strategic debt is when you make insufficient time to plan, to think, to examine what's working and what's not. You just keep punching the to-do list every day but your business doesn't move forward more than small increments because strategic debt is piling up. Content debt is when your content falls further and further away from current best practices. Anyone who has done search engine optimization (SEO) knows the pain of content debt, of content that used to generate results but no longer does - and you don't make the time to update it. The most dangerous kind of debt, however, is knowledge debt.
This is your continuing education, your professional development debt. When you don't keep current, when your knowledge of your specialty ages past the point of usefulness and crosses into dangerous, your knowledge debt makes you a liability rather than an asset. This is like an SEO manager who has no idea what BERT is (and why it is relevant to SEO) or an email marketing manager who has no idea what GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, or PIPL are. The way to solve debt is by one of the two methods I outlined above: you can pay as you go, which is the preferred way because it's a little bit very frequently, or you can pay all at once and settle up. I've spent my evenings the last two weeks configuring this server and rebuilding it, and I can tell you with great confidence that I will be switching to paying as I go, keeping my systems up to date much more frequently.
What is your technical debt and how do you pay it? Email marketing analytics are essential to successful campaigns. So why wouldn’t I rely solely on the click tracking stats in my email marketing software? Because we know that open and click tracking in email marketing are a little squishy. I can still do that tracking there, but Google Analytics filters out most bots and spiders if you have turned that setting on. That means that the data I get in Google Analytics should be a little more reliable and human. Why is email marketing click tracking data squishy?
Some folks have mail systems and servers that pre-fetch mail. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection does this, which badly skews open rates. In businesses, companies that use high-end firewalls and other cybersecurity protections often have servers that will open and click on every link in an incoming email to check it for malware and viruses. That means, as an email marketer, you may see higher click-through rates than are actually real. So that is why I use this particular method for polls in my email newsletters. It is the least amount of work for you and my best effort at reliable data for me. Feel free to use this technique in your own email marketing!
