How to select marketing campaigns that give the highest return for the least amount of effort?
If you’re a marketing manager, you must come across a lot of campaign ideas and suggestions to improve campaigns from all kinds of people -- the head of other departments, your own teammates, and anyone in your organization whose results are linked to marketing performance.
If you’re a new marketing manager, wait for a while. You’ll soon be drawn into a sea of ideas and suggestions. The overwhelming force will awash you soon and you will feel lost or disoriented.
I’m not trying to scare you. You can ask anyone who is managing a marketing team for more than a year. They all deal with this white elephant. If they aren’t somehow, they are going to be. It is inevitable.
To top it off, not executing some ideas could lead to a hurt feeling. Many may conclude that their ideas are not being heard. And before you know it, new ideas may stop coming. Believe me, this is a more critical issue than the previous one.
You need a sound system to prioritize experiments and to manage ideas to avoid this vicious cycle of hurt feelings. One such system is the ICE framework which I’ll discuss today.
The ICE framework offers a step-by-step approach to pick the best ideas like our moms pick the best five tomatoes from a sea of tomatoes at a vegetable seller. Not only that, it helps justify your selection as well.
I learned the framework recently from Brian Massey's course on Basics of CRO which is part of the CXL Conversion Optimization Minidgeree program-- I enrolled myself last week. The program consists of 33 courses covering fundamentals of CRO, optimization best practices, conversion research, testing strategies, and CRO program management.
The content is superb. The instructors are the best in the industry -- Peep Laza, Talia Wolf, Andre Mores, Michael Aagaard, and others. Succinctly put, the whole program is a one-stop-shop to build or hone your conversion optimization skills
If you’re looking for an online course on CRO, I personally recommend you give CXL Minidegree a try. Otherwise, keep checking this space as I’m going to share my learning over the next few months here.
Now circling back to the topic at hand: How to select the best campaign idea which is a bang for the buck.
How to select the low effort, high impact ideas?
The process consists of the following steps:
- Collecting Idea
- Turning ideas to the hypothesis
- Ranking the hypothesis using ICE framework
- Developing a Scale
- Prioritizing
Idea Collections
As a marketer, you know you get bombarded with ideas continuously. You receive them from your LinkedIn and Instagram feeds, from blog posts (like this one), some are suggested by your teammates, and many come from other departments like Sales or customer success.
In short, you come across a lot of ideas to improve your campaign, strategy, or a particular landing page or ad.
If you want to use them, make sure to collect them so they don't get lost. You can create a list of ideas on Evernote, Google Keep, or one that is loved at every nook and corner of the internet -- spreadsheet.
Converting ideas into testable Hypothesis
Ideas and suggestions come to you in many forms. Most of the time that form isn't very clear. For example, you may receive suggestions/ideas like we aren’t very active on social media, we should give videos a try, I think we should make our blog emotionally appealing,
If you stare at such statements closely, you’ll find these are not specific. Yes, they point to action but why the suggestion is made, isn't clear. You also don't know what result a suggester expects from an idea.
Remember our goal is to create a first-pass filter to find sound ideas from an ocean of ideas. In that pursuit, this is an important step. While you are listing your ideas, it is better to understand what they really mean? It helps turn ideas into testable hypotheses.
You can follow the below hypothesis formula to convert every idea into a testable hypothesis.
For example, a suggestion “we aren’t very active on social media” can be made more specific in the following way:
If we double the number of social media posts, I expect the social media traffic to increase by XX% in 3 weeks, as measured by Google Analytics.
If we publish videos, I expect our conversion rate to be improved by 10% after 30 days of publishing the video, as measured by Google Analytics.
Ranking Hypothesis Using ICE Framework
Once you have your ideas converted into testable hypotheses, the next step is to find the high-impact low efforts ideas using the ICE framework. ICE is an acronym for Impact, Confidence, and Effort. You rank each idea thrice -- on a scale of 1 to 5 -- on the basis of its Impact, your level of Confidence in the idea, and the level of Effort needed to execute it.
About Scale
Below I’ve used a 5 pointer scale as it saves time compared to a 10 pointer scale and keeps closely related options separated, unlike a 3 pointer scale. It is only to help you get started. You must modify it on the basis of context and the type of marketing activity you are running.
Impact:
1 - less than 5% increase
2 - greater than 5% but less than 10%
3 - greater than 10% but less than 20%
4 - greater than 20% but less than 30%
5- greater than 30%
Confidence
1 - Gut feeling says it can work but no data/evidence exists for support
2 - Seen it working once (read a report, case study, etc)
3 - Seen it working multiple others (read a report, case study, data, etc)
4 - Tried similar ideas before
5 - Tried exactly similar ideas before
Efforts
5 - Less than an hour
4 - Less than or equal to a day
3 - Greater than a day and less than a week
2 - Greater than one week and less than a month
1 - Greater than one month
Once you have your scale ready, you can rank every idea, and calculate a final score.
If you want to get started right away, you can use this ICE template on Google sheet here.
If you want to refine your understanding of the framework, here are few links for you to begin with:
- https://cxl.com/blog/better-way-prioritize-ab-tests/
- https://help.optimizely.com/Ideate_and_Hypothesize/Build_a_basic_prioritization_framework