Here’s a very non-theoretical problem – you’ve got two ways of spending some digital marketing budget, either a) LinkedIn advertising, or b) Facebook advertising. The former works pretty well, you manage to calculate a return of $1.50 for every dollar you spend. The Facebook adverts are more effective though – a return of $1.80 for every dollar spent. Question is – which do you do? Obvious isn’t it, it’s Facebook?

No, the answer is both. I’d argue that, for most orgs, particularly those in a mid-stage, scaleup phase, the more you can spend on things that work, the better. Why? Because the only reason you’d choose one over the other is from a desire to improve Efficiency – to get more bang for your buck. But for many orgs that isn’t your job, your objective is to improve Effectiveness – to improve your outcomes, to grow, to maximise your revenues and profits as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter if some activities are less efficient – do them all!

Les Binet and Peter Field explain the difference very clearly here, around 5:58:

I think there’s an additional subtlety here for growing businesses – that the relative importance of these two approaches varies depending on the stage of growth for your company, and the objectives handed down by your boss or board. For some very early start-ups, you’re not worried about metrics like “Marketing ROI”, “Marketing generated pipeline” and so on – you’re just trying to find product-market fit, and finding any way of reaching your audience. Marketing effort is far more likely to be focused on early strategy – what is the market we’re after? Who are these people? What would they use instead of our product? Who are we competing with? How would we reach these people anyway? You’re not yet at a point where you know how to spend marketing dollars!

For many large orgs, particularly those with investors, efficiency does become much more important – growth is relatively flat and the strategies might focus more on reducing the customer acquisition costs. I’ve spoken to a couple of people at this sort of company in recent years – not a role I envy perhaps, but at least it’s clear what you’re being asked to do. Your job is to optimise, find efficiencies, cut costs, track the Marketing ROI ruthlessly, and cut waste.

The middle stage is interesting though. You’ve got product-market fit, you know your market, why customers buy from you and you’ve figured out a few channels and activities that seem to work. But now everyone just wants more. More leads, more growth, more $$ – there’s never enough! This is a great time for marketing – as noted in Rise of the Revenue Marketer, there’s a clear link between the activities of the marketing department and company success – it’s exciting, but it can also be a little daunting. Here’s a poorly sketched illustration, of the phase I’m referring to:

The trick is to remember that efficiency is not your goal here. In the example at the top of this page, both tactics give profitable return – so you just need to do both. Accept that you’re picking both low-hanging fruit and high-hanging fruit. Some of your leads will be easily won – great customers, right in the middle of your Ideal Customer Profile. Sales pick them up, work the order in a matter of weeks, and hey presto – easy money. Others will be much harder to convince – the customer is a long way from a sure bet (maybe wrong industry, wrong org size, wrong technology stack). They’re very early stage – sort of interested, but they’re not sure what they want, or if they want it from you (tip – this is where great lead nurturing becomes invaluable). It’s going to take a lot of effort to win those deals – but you still need to do it. You’re not being measured on how efficiently you ran your campaigns (as mentioned in the video above, the most efficient way of running a campaign is to not run it at all!). You’re being measured on the maximisation of outcomes of leads, opportunities and revenue.

There’s an obvious chink in this armour – a well run business has to be profitable. Is it really okay just to spend wildly? I believe strongly in tight budgetary constraints – total freedom on spend leads to laziness, and a lack of focus. In the example at the top, we’re still trying to measure what’s working and what isn’t. We’re not doing things that are unprofitable. And if the return on something was $1.01 for every dollar spent, I’d be far less interested. It’s important to still work very hard measuring what does work. You should be constantly looking for more impactful ways of spending money, and also discarding tactics that aren’t working (easier said than done!).

But you need to be careful on cutting spend on the long-term brand building activities – the money you spend on non-activation activities that can’t be measured in the short term. These are the things that make you more effective in the long term. In a marketing department you have to weigh up your investments in short-term activation activities (“Click on this link to download our report!”), with those for long-term awareness of what you do – warming up customers for future activation. If you get this right, then you will be considerably more profitable – we all know it’s infinitely easy to get a customer interested when he/she is already aware of you, and has a positive inclination towards your offering or brand.

So a strong mix of long-term brand building (or “Investment in propensity to buy” – far more palatable to many 😉) and a wide range of activation activities, focused on how you can be most effective – winning both low and high-hanging fruits – is, for me, the strongest strategy when your goal is growth. And if you want to scale up as quickly as you can – stop worrying about efficiencies – that’s a problem for the future!