Recursive Function

Steve Rubel had an interesting post yesterday about new ways to approach marketing called The Moneyball Marketing Era, which is a reference to the popular business/baseball book from Michael Lewis that immortalized Billy Beane as one of the most innovative front office manager’s in the history of baseball.

Essentially Rubel states that marketers need to find new ways to approach marketing opportunities and activities. You need to focus not on reach but on effectiveness, find relationships, and find compelling metrics, like completions of tasks (downloads, buys, sign ups) from a site instead of simple page views. For instance, if you are a social network that is bringing together underwater photo enthusiasts, don’t advertise or look for mentions on TechCrunch or Scoble, but rather look for advertising/marketing opportunities on blogs or sites that are discussing underwater photos, where the smaller number of readers will probably make for better customers or users of your site. Start a new contest for best underwater photos with that site and watch their readers become users of your site.

I agree with this, though I am not sure that it is all that new of an idea. At FormSpring we have been looking at advertising and marketing opportunities for the last few weeks and have been practicing essentially the same ideas that Rubel mentions. Because of the broad nature of our online form builder, we know that we could spend many days and dollars trying to get to all of our different niches (non profits, small business, web designers, education, marketers, event planners, etc.) but we have decided to target web designers because they are the ones who are helping create web sites and who potentially could become the greatest advocates for a tool like FormSpring. We are looking at how to get users to sign up with the most effective use of our ad dollars and marketing hours and what sites within the web design world will help us achieve that.

The answers though aren’t in the explanation but rather in the execution, I think even the least knowledgeable marketer wants to get, or knows he needs to get where Rubel is pointing, but many don’t know how to get there. My experience and humble opinion tell me that testing, testing, and testing are the best ways to get there. I once had a mentor tell me that every marketing program is a test, and that every test better have an answer. So, yeah, find those esoteric stats, create those relationships, but don’t be afraid to test and keep testing (and measuring) until you find out what’s working.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.