“If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”

Today we start with a quote from Fight Club:

“If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”

Whatever you know, the movie or the book, I am not going to be the nerd saying the book is better. Let's stick to all the movie quotes we can find online. There are enough red pills in these quotes to fall over.

From this quote we will make a quantum jump to criticize and possibly help all the people working in marketing, starting from myself. Most of us could drastically improve our own competence and results, but we need to be prepared to (metaphorically) fight.

There will be some key concepts, perhaps technical for those not working in marketing, but all in all fairly simple, yet largely unapplied (and that's why they are a big opportunity - think differently - my dear Steve Jobs). So if you are a marketer stick with me, if you are not a marketer you have the chance to sound like a pro after reading just the next 20 lines from a random dude like me.

Lots of marketers have been raised with offline marketing education that was used to measure very little and grew up with digital marketing that was used to measure a lot. Cookies, users or marketers alike you should be concerned, as you know are going away , Apple loves to be empathetic with people's privacy while trying to revive its high-potential advertising business, and the world economy is expected to go south (aka recession) by most experts and so we should be prepared for some additional difficulty ahead (next 6-18 months).

This rant is just to say things are getting messy, for everybody, but especially for marketing people.

Here 3 concepts all brands should consider doing, though only the top most sophisticated 1% really do

Do you want a TLDR because you are short of time or because you couldn't care less about marketing gimmickry? You are totally right. Here you go:

You can probably save 20%+ of your marketing money, with no consequence on your results.

Do you plan to spend $5 million in marketing this year? Yep, you could probably target a $1 million saving. Just make sure you invite me to the celebration party if you are going to use this freed budget to organize one. ????

1) Spend money based on the value you want.

Remember, if you don't know what you want you end up with a lot you don't.

Do you want more leads (i.e. names and email/phone numbers of people interested in your product/service)? If so you know that 90% of the leads you get are useless, so you should start spending based on something better. You can avoid duplicates to start with, then weigh leads by their (carefully calculated) score. Are you already doing it? Good. Now do it in real-time so bidding algorithms adapt seamlessly.

Do you have an e-commerce business and focus on optimizing ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend)? There are good chances you could save up to 25% of your budget by not spending (too much) money to acquire revenues coming from returning customers, which you would get anyway or by leveraging cheaper marketing channels.

Do you have a business based on physical stores, like 90% of revenues coming from them while the rest is from e-commerce? Okay. You also did some useful research showing that it's almost impossible that a person goes to one of your stores if he/she lives 20km+ further away from it? Good. If all this is true, are you sure the marketing budget spend is aligned with the location's revenue potential?

2) Worthless, false and fraudulent clicks are real.

Up to 8% of the online marketing budget you spend is wasted. Just take this as a friend's ballpark estimate.

Ah, and this is an estimate for your most qualified marketing channels. If we are talking about affiliate marketing, display advertising and so on expect way more wasted money.

Remember, if you don't know what you want...

3) Automation is cool, until you don't understand how you automate anymore.

Everybody talks about bots, AI and machine learning, but the reality is that these words are abused in 10x more cases than when they should actually be used. Too many companies boast about these concepts while simply using linear decision trees and second-grade equations.

Big Tech is actually using them, but if they say they use technology to take decisions on your behalf, you have other reasons to ponder whether it's cool or not. ??

All advertising platforms correctly implemented automated bidding strategies in order to allow marketing teams to move on from the online marketing middle age (early 2010s) when we cared every day how much we spent on a click. However, assume - just to oversimplify - that an advertising platform bidding algorithm has the bias to target your desired marketing efficiency (e.g. 10€ per generated purchase) while spending as much budget as possible.

The question is, was all that budget spent really necessary?

If you never looked into it the likely answer is simple: NO.

Start by bidding down and bidding up across all your major dimensions (campaigns, audiences, etc,), take note when costs and results move without correlation.

Keep bidding up when it produces something that is worth it, while cut spending when there is no point in maximizing your click volume even if you are hitting your marketing efficiency target.

The risk is that if you don't have a strong opinion on automation, you tend to get a lot of automation to the point you don't understand it.

Remember, if you don't know what you want...

Fair enough?

Like and comment if you want more.

I am open to discussing the details with some of you, if you want.