Using past experience for Digital Marketing
By: Andy Knight
Tags: Startup, Learning And Development, Digital Marketing

As a research analyst, I spent A LOT of time reading. Company announcements like annual reports, articles on economics, industry journals, investment ideas, other analysts reports and books on analysing financials & companies.

You could never sit still as an analyst. Information for finance will never sit and wait, it may slow, but it wont stop. You could also never assume you got your company picks correct. You need to look at it subjectively, second guess and run different assumptions & scenarios and make a determination with a reasonable confidence.

I think this is the same with Marketing. You can launch a campaign, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.

In fact Marketing/Growth shares many similarities with Finance. Many of the processes and frameworks that some of the noted names talk about, (Sean Ellis, Brian Balfour, Gabriel Weinberg, Morgan Brown, Andrew Chen etc) are similar to those that a research analyst uses. Likewise, many of the tools (A/B testing) have the same foundations as to how and when they’re used in finance. They both likely come from scientific research.

Processes & Frameworks

Without structure or processes to analyse a company or the risk of a portfolio in finance, you’re just shooting in the dark. You’re pulling information up randomly and expecting a good outcome.

This was me when I first tried looking at marketing and in particular SEO for my startup. I was looking at basic articles with catchy headlines and I fell into a trap.

What I very quickly realised was that they were catchy headlines with BS substance when you start searching. After buying some key books and following some well respected marketing/growth guys, you understand that it involves a methodology and a set of processes to succeed over time. “Viral” & “Hacks” are catchy titles for articles but it’s best to avoid these because they’re unlikely to have any substance or be repeatable.

I’ve recently been speaking to some existing Growth / Digital marketers. It’s pretty interesting that they speak about $ spend on advertising as a measure of stature / ability. I talk about analytics and north star metrics below, but this unfortunately is very similar to the finance world. Deals and dollars trump performance and successful outcomes.

It pays to think independently

Believe it or not, as a research analyst I had to try and think differently to everyone else. I didn’t want to look into details about the latest market darling, I needed to try and find one without the spotlight.

It’s worth reading about information that is outside of the scope of your area. Case studies are written in both Digital / Growth Marketing & Finance with plenty of detail and information about a particular company, industry or method. Now, if your company isn’t exactly the same as the case study, does that mean the information doesn’t apply?

NO

It means that you have to look at it slightly differently, but know that there’s information for you to explore, reflect about and possibly use in the future.

If it’s on B2B, should it be ignored if you work in B2C?

No way

Pick it apart a little and you will see that you can use ideas from it that can sit in your world. In finance, I used to keep a “Bible” of references, frameworks, resources & even quotes that I’d refer to for each industry. They were basically cheat sheets. I’ve also done the same with Marketing, with a spreadsheet broken into the different areas (content, conversion, testing, Paid Social, GAds, Seo, etc) and frequently add to them with new articles & case studies.

I read with the intention of learning, not copying and trying to find something to file away for another day — adding reminders to check this is also a good idea. These resources really come in handy for ideation/brainstorming later on.

North Star

Finding and then focussing on the metrics that matter.

If you’re really data driven you should identify the most important metric for your current stage, the one the product/service delivers to customers. Once settled, you should constantly learn about and optimise for that metric.

In my old research world when I started analysing a company, I’d try and find out and then focus on the major drivers of revenue & earnings. A lot of companies inflate particular metrics or areas of growth, but if it’s only 6% of total revenues or earnings, it’s impact is likely to be minimal, at least in the short term.

By focussing on the metrics that matter from the start, I was able to ignore large parts of information that don’t move the needle or have an impact.

Analysing Data

Lean Analytics addresses this perfectly and is well worth the read if you’re unsure what you should be measuring or looking at for a given business model. They cover 2 sided market places, SaaS, eCommerce, B2B and more.

Getting hung up on high level or the wrong data & analytics without digging into the real ones is dangerous.

It can be difficult to highlight the importance if everyone is going at 100%, but if others don’t understand the impacts can be costly.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget and hard to articulate how your past experience contributes to your thinking, but this is what I’m trying to do here.