The Realities Of Marketing

Those of you who know me will be aware that my go-to approach to life is that of an engineer or a scientist.

By that I mean: I like to experiment, collect observations, come up with hypotheses, and then test them some more. And it's an approach I've applied to #marketing over the last five years ... with varying results.

This article is a write-up of such an experiment, and I hope that it will prove elucidative for those of you who, like me, are technically minded but have recently become aware that not everything can be handled purely as an engineering problem.

If you are a true scientist, you have to accept the readily observable fact that there are marketing and sales people in the world, and that the world seems to value them enough to pay them a salary. One that may substantially exceed yours.

This suggests that there is some value to what they do.

The experiment

36 hours ago I started another marketing investigation. The results are now in.

The experiment was to craft two LinkedIn posts to advertise a new product. In this case, it was a t-shirt to go with my recent book on #tokenomics . A t-shirt is probably the simplest thing to sell, right? And four hundred people have bought my book so far, so at least some of them are going to want to wear a t-shirt referring to it.

It's certainly easy enough to use some of the various shopping and fulfillment sites out there to put a t-shirt on the market, especially if you already have the graphics you need right there on the cover of your book.

Then the question is: how to make the world aware that your new product is available for purchase.

And in my case the answer is obvious - post about it on LinkedIn.

The teaser

The first post was the teaser - a pre-announcement of the product to be sold.

I pulled out all the stops by using almost every trick I know for improving engagement when it comes to LinkedIn posts. A draw-you-in first line, a selfie to provide the human connection, a pseudo-poll (you can't add real polls to an image post) to raise the urge to respond, and some humor to make the reader more receptive.

And a bunch of other stuff, but unfortunately the margin of this post is too small for me to provide more details (hint: I knew most people were going to vote B, because I designed the poll to ensure it).

Everything was engineered to increase the number of comments, and hence the reach of the post. And the first part of my plan worked - I got 83 comments, although only a rather disappointing 67 reactions. The LinkedIn algorithm strikes again, and clearly my post-crafting requires some tweaking.

At this point in time, post number one has had 4600 impressions.

The reveal

The second post was the reveal. It contains a link to the product sale site , a call-back to some comments from the first post, and of course I picked the image most likely to attract attention from the ones Printful (the fulfillment company) kindly provided. Thank you mysterious lady in jeans.

There were only 21 comments this time, but 54 reactions, and 3400 impressions.

Not bad. If I wanted to buy that kind of targeted advertising, I'd be looking at a couple of hundred euros, at least.

And I've counted the comments - there are approximately 20 in the two posts that could be interpreted as an intention to buy the t-shirt.

The results

So how many sales have I made so far?

Are you ready?

Three.

That's the sales funnel for you. I got the advert in front of 9000 people. About 200 people engaged. 20 showed genuine interest.

And three converted to a sale.

Now, of course it's early days. With a bit more work, I may get it up to ten, or even twenty if I'm very lucky. But unless some miracle occurs, this particular product is unlikely to go viral.

The conclusion

Engineers - that is what sales and marketing is like. Every step along the way you lose an order of magnitude. It's like a military campaign with the worst attrition rate known to man.

With careful planning, previous experience, and a bit of good fortune, you can narrow the funnel, but it will still be an exponential decay from phase to phase, just like the transformation of a radioactive isotope.

It's almost as though the behaviour of the buying public is a natural law.

The twist

When I started this experiment I made a decision, namely to send everyone who bought a t-shirt within 24 hours of my second post a signed hardback copy of Evil Tokenomics as a thank-you.

I did some calculations, and estimated that I wouldn't go above five sales, and so in an unusual example of marketing hubris on my part, I only ordered five author copies of my book.

Five years ago, I wouldn't have taken this gamble. What if a hundred people had bought the t-shirt? Or a thousand?

I now know better. And yet, even with my new-found sales cynicism, I was still over-optimistic!

The meta-twist

Those of you who know me well will be aware that my go-to approach to marketing is similar to the manner in which Penn and Teller approach magic.

I like to explain what I am doing while I am doing it - partially out of some need to assuage the guilt I feel as an engineer sullied by the world of sales and marketing, but mainly because it has become part of my "brand".

So - full disclosure. This isn't an educational article. It's yet another marketing pitch. And no, if you rush out and buy a t-shirt now you won't get a signed copy of my book. That boat has sailed.

But the next time I put a product in front of you, you're going to be wondering: "Could this come with extra unexpected bonuses?"

Maybe it will, and maybe it won't. But what I do know is that the mere thought - that little voice in the back of your head wondering about it - should provide enough of a nudge to engender a few more sales.

Because that's the way the human mind works.

This has been a marketing article. I hope you've enjoyed it.

#blockchaingandalf