A colleague made a simple observation yesterday that many marketers are “spending lots of money on reaching potential customers, but very little to nothing on engaging with them.” It’s like they spend a ton of money to generate awareness, but when potential customers arrive on their sites or social media channels, there’s little to nothing there. So they leave disappointed, often to the long-term detriment of the advertiser. This is so true. It has been this way over the years, but never more so than now. I have observed the same phenomena over the last two decades doing digital strategy consulting for marketers and also teaching digital marketing.
Pitching and Catching - Both Are Needed to Play the Game of Marketing
I have written before that I think Digital Marketing Is Like Baseball; Mostly The Catching Part. What I mean by that is advertisers can “pitch” their message out to potential customers using awareness tactics, but they need to make sure they are also doing sufficient “catching” to harvest the demand. Otherwise the sales are not captured, or worse, someone else harvests the sales. For example, Kodak was “pitching” when they were doing advertising for their digital cameras. But when most prospective customers search, they type in “digital camera” because that’s the thing they want, as opposed to the specific brand of digital camera. If Kodak didn’t have enough content, or any content, that ranked highly in search results, but Fuji did, the consumers would end up reading more about Fuji digital cameras. Or if Canon had better reviews on Amazon, consumers might end up buying a Canon digital camera instead of a Kodak one, even though Kodak spent money on advertising their digital cameras. Kodak spent all their budget on advertising (“pitching”) and not enough on content that is helpful to consumers’ purchase decisions so someone else harvested the demand (“catching”). As in the game of baseball, both pitching and catching are needed to play the game. Advertisers should also make sure they do enough catching.
Marketers Need More Catching in Digital, Less Pitching
If you think about your own habits for a minute, consider what happens when you see something interesting in an ad. Most humans’ habit is to go online and search for more information, to inform their own purchase decision. Of course they don’t need to research simple, low cost items like soda; but if it’s a more complex product, or one that costs a lot of money, consumers will do more research. When they “google” for more information, that’s the perfect time for the advertiser to do more catching. If the advertiser has useful content that provides decision-support — i.e. helps potential customers answer the questions they have — the customers can get further along their purchase journey, perhaps all the way to the purchase. The advertiser that has the best, most useful content will be the most likely to harvest that demand. Furthermore, consider this. Every dollar spent on advertising is “used up” once the ad is aired. But every dollar spent on creating useful content continues to pay dividends over time, because future customers will likely have the same questions, and need answers to move along their journeys towards the purchase. This is the “catching” we talked about earlier; because of consumers’ habits to search for more information, catching happens in “digital.”
Now consider how advertisers are using digital today. They are buying massive quantities of digital ads, trying to get reach and frequency. Ads are “pitching.” They are completely neglecting the “catching” that we mentioned above. The volume of ads is getting so ridiculous that consumers have had to start protecting themselves with ad blockers. No matter how well the advertiser thinks the ads are “targeted” consumers think otherwise. This is what I call suboptimal “spray and pray” — i.e. it’s a suboptimal way to use “digital.” If marketers rebalanced their budgets to include more “catching” tactics in digital, it would be a far better use of the money and will result in far more demand harvested.
A Framework for When to use Which Tactic
Augustine Fou
So how does a marketer decide how to allocate their dollars to improve outcomes? The framework above is one that I've used with marketers for the last decade and a half. If we take a typical purchase funnel and turn it on its side, we can then plot the various advertising and marketing tactics too, both offline and online. Relatively speaking, TV advertising is better for mass awareness (left side), compared to digital tactics which are better for harvesting demand (right side) as we discussed above. If you then expand the digital part (blue), various digital tactics can also be arrayed along the spectrum. Display and video ads are good for driving awareness (left side), while search ads, cost per lead, and cost per sale tactics are all more “performance-like” — further to the right side.
Augustine Fou
Here’s how we use the framework. If the advertiser is big enough to afford TV advertising, they can allocate budget to awareness driving tactics like TV, print, and radio. They just need to make sure they do sufficient catching in digital, so they harvest the demand. If the advertiser were a small or medium business that cannot afford TV, they should focus on the blue bar at the bottom of the slide — the digital
Augustine Fou
tactics. But they still need to choose which digital tactics to use. If the product is brand new — e.g. a DTC (direct to consumer) brand — and the primary need is awareness, use display ads and video ads (left side). However, if the product or brand is already known, but something else is keeping users from buying more of it, advertisers should allocate more budget to mid-funnel
Augustine Fou
activities such as paid search and organic search (content creation). Remember that useful content that helps customers answer their “missing links” and get further along their customer journey will help advertisers more efficiently harvest their demand. If your organic content does not yet “rank” in natural search results, pay for some paid search to get customers to your sites and content. Over time, when your SEO (search engine optimization) kicks in, you can spend less and less on paid search ads. Finally, we can also use this framework as a general guide for which tactics to choose, depending on the nature of the product. If it is a simple, low-cost, low-consideration product like “soup or soda” awareness tactics are likely the best option. If it is a more complex, bigger ticket item like “cars and computers” then more budget should be invested in the mid funnel on “decision-support” tactics that help customers get to the purchase, and choose your brand when they purchase, as efficiently as possible.
Of course these are generalizations, and there are endless variations and exceptions that may be possible. But consider it a framework and a guide for those who need a place to start. As practitioners, the idea is to start somewhere, and refine from there. Nothing should be set in stone; and everything should be treated as test and learn and optimize.
I hope this is helpful and useful. Please reach out and let me know if it is; also reach out if you think it is not helpful. I’d love to learn and adapt.
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Unified Marketing Framework - When To Use Which Tactic - Forbes
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