What is a “Scientific” Approach to Marketing?
A Different Approach
Despite a wealth of analytics platforms, conversion optimization tools, AI gadgets and novel SaaS- B2B marketing is still notoriously hard to track when it comes to impact.
We can track activities- input, points of inflection when a prospect moves to the next stage in a deal flow, but we don’t know the first impression someone had of the brand, or what words may have struck a chord that led them to follow us on social media in the first place years prior.
Marketing is messy. It’s amorphous.
But, I do believe there’s an approach to maximize trackability from a scientific lens without becoming too lost in the data.
Science is rooted in curiousity. It’s the root of the “f around and find out” index.
If we don’t try, we’ll never know.
But before we begin, we must ALWAYS begin with a hypothesis and understand when it’s the right time to walk away from the idea you may have thought was truly brilliant, or your CEO thought would pivot the company entirely.
What is “Success”?
If your team doesn’t have the same definition of success, you’re doomed to fail.
Alignment is the most important piece before work begins. Norden approaches this by beginning with discovery and strategy creation. We determine what the team’s true goals are and reverse-engineer how to get there. We create multiple paths because we recognize the existence of unknown unknowns.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
And we have a very clear point of inflection painted to determine if an effort is still worthwhile. Here’s how this looks:
We’re going run this campaign for 6 months.
We believe it should yield at least 10 qualified leads.
If the campaign yields fewer than 10 qualified leads, we stop and reallocate the budget.
We program for expected failure, and try different variations until we find what works.
I had a client who I really wanted paid media to work for. We ran multiple types of campaigns over a multi-year period. It didn’t work.
And it’s not that they weren’t getting leads- they were. And the targeting was good, in theory. But the reality was an unknown unknown I couldn’t see going into it.
This was a financial advisory, and financial literacy is lacking across the board.
People would call in looking for loans, thinking they were a bank. We made sure to include negative keywords for the terms they were looking for (bank, loan, debt relief, etc) and they still found us and ate up the time of team members who could have been spending their time on more productive tasks.
We turned it off after the test period and decided to focus more on organic and sales enablement. They already had relationships- what did it look like to engage with them in a different way.
We shifted to a focus on top-of-mind awareness and a bi-weekly newsletter that has consistently has an open rate above 30%. Their clients want to hear from them, and the more often we’re able to get in front of them, the more likely they are to refer friends and family.
A scientific approach to marketing is a different mindset where we observe all of the data available to make the next best step toward your goals, and if we aren’t on-track, we pivot (quickly).
Ready to work with a partner who prioritizes marketing outcomes?
Schedule a meeting with Norden Marketing.