Some Personal News
#20 Marketing technology has created lazy digital marketers
Happy Sunday. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support. This will be the final newsletter of the year. Included in today’s edition is how to think about building a stronger awareness-interest-donation-brand advocacy funnel and a checklist to ensure a smooth-sailing and wildly successful End-of-Year fundraising moment.
Let’s dig in!
🌶 Spicy Thought Ahead of 2023 🌶
Marketing technology has created lazy marketers.
Here’s why:
Focus has shifted from creative to tech.
Increased amount of time managing tech.
Thinking tech and tools are the silver bullet.
Optimizing around the code vs. the copy.
Attribution building not audience building.
More time spent creating things for the tech, not for donors.
Donors don’t care about your tech. Only you do. 🤷🏻♂️
How to Build a Stronger Funnel
With the emergence of targeted online advertising platforms many marketers figured out how to build a business without having to spend inefficiently on the Awareness and Interest parts of a traditional funnel.
Today, and moving forward, we don’t have access to the same levels of data that we used to have. Uncle Zuc and Cambridge Analytica took care of that. Facebook instantly began removing the ability for us to SEE the data at a micro level, even though they could. Then, after Tim Cook built his own Apple demand side platform (aka ads-serving platform), he cut the ability for advertising platforms to get the full breadth of data they received before. Now, not only could we not see that micro-level data, but even Facebook wasn’t getting it.
So to fix that, we had to audit the way that we went out and approached donors. Previously, I could use a tool like AdEspresso and launch a campaign with 48 versions of creative at $3k per day, and within 72 hours, I had a clear understanding of which 5 were going to scale to $20k per day. Facebook also knew exactly WHO to show the ad to because they were tracking you across every DM, every post like and comment, who you were hanging out and getting lunch with… We had to shift our paid-social ads to be full-funnel capable.
Advertising today needs to speak to someone, whether they know everything about your brand and can’t wait to make a donation, OR they have no idea about anything related to your brand and you need to educate them toward a donation.
All that said, let’s break down some activities and tactics that can help you drive a stronger awareness-interest-donation-brand advocacy funnel. I’ll add some notes as to how I’d do it, too.
Upper Funnel:
• Advertorials - This is similar to sponsored editorial content on publisher sites. The key here is being able to run the ads whitelisted from the publisher itself, not from your brand account.
• Listicle LPs - I like to read through a brand’s reviews, find the top benefits/reasons that people mention they love donating to X org, and reverse it from top to bottom, starting with the most loved. You can get away with 5 reasons or benefits, but ideally, you do 7.
• Influencer campaigns - You can do these a few ways: seeding influencers, creating content, and posting it on your own across social media, emails, and website, OR have them create content and you run it as a whitelisted ad. The last is what I’ve done to maximize the ROI of any influencer partnership, but the first option can do well if you have the right alignment with the influencer and the product or brand.
• TV campaigns - Plenty of people call this upper funnel. I’m not sure I fully agree. TV is great to test as a full-funnel strategy, starting with remnant inventory and testing creative, and then slowly increasing. When I oversaw TV buys at Unicef in the US market, we focused entirely on driving immediate donations, and it worked well for a few channels.
• Out of Home - Who looks at billboards? OOH can be great in more condensed markets (LA, NY, Austin, SF, Miami, Boston, etc) when you can track measurement through mobile device IDs and see how many ended up making a donation. You can also leverage the same technology to collect mobile device IDs and retarget donors on paid social.
• Inserts in other brand packages - Have you ever opened a Food delivery shipment and seen an insert for something tangential? Maybe not, but that’s what this tactic is. It’s somewhat targeted toward a similar consumer, and you have to take the card out and see it.
• Podcasts - This can be organic (think seeding or from a guest) or through a sponsorship.
• SEO - The best way to build trust with someone new? Just give them the answers! In this case, it’s with quality long-form written content or long-form YouTube video content (yes, YouTube counts for SEO).
Middle Funnel:
• Whitelisting campaigns - This is similar to advertorials or influencers above, but more focused on lower funnel creative, driving to a landing page, still coming from not-your-brands page.
• Organic social - You’d be surprised how many prospective donors look your brand up on social (Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc) before making a donation, or when they’re thinking about making a donation. If you don’t have good content on social, you’re not trustworthy to give a credit card number to!
• PR - Ah, the game of PR. You can play the game and hire a PR agency, or a better way to think about getting PR is figuring out how you can help a writer or an editor with a story. And, of course, gift guides don’t hurt either ;)
• Affiliate - Getting inserted on websites, social media accounts, blogs, etc. with their vouch to donate to you is one of the best forms of marketing. It’s the intersection of social proof and native content.
• Strong email marketing - Chances are, this prospective donor has been to your site and put their email in. Make sure all your flows are locked in, full of benefits, education, and reasons why existing donors can’t get enough of funding your projects!
• More content - There’s nothing better than just putting out more content, everywhere, all the time. Don’t get romantic about timing your content, in fact, do things off-schedule.
• Direct mail - This is a channel that continues to be valuable and ROI-positive. Even if someone wants to throw out their mail, they still have to skim through it!
• Product/brand collaborations - Nothing makes a brand cooler than nailing a collaboration. Objectively the World Food Program (WFP) is quite boring (love you and thank you for you’re subscriptions to this newsletter!), but someone who’s on the fence that sees their Michael Kors or Balenciaga collaboration is now going to be a lot more excited about engaging with WFP (even if it’s not buying the collab, the brand just got a lot more relevant).
• Build an on-site experience - If you can build something where you deliver value to someone, you will have a built-in growth engine.
Bottom Funnel:
• Paid social - Meta, TikTok, Snap, and the others.
• Paid search - Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
• Match/promotions - Not something to run everyday but used strategically can be very powerful. Nothing gets someone more excited than knowing they can double their impact! Most of the time when people are about to donate, they just need the validation that it’s not a stupid decision. A Match to double someone’s impact helps corroborate that story!
• Landing pages - Need I say more?
• More content - At this stage of the funnel, all your content should be answering 5 main questions:
1. What is it?
2. How will this benefit the recipient?
3. What problem is it solving?
4. Why are you the best option available to me?
5. How quickly can I donate and send help/aid/support?
Across all 3 stages, the commonality is high-quality and high-volume content. Advertising is just adding more targeted impressions to the content you create, but if you cannot create high-quality content to push, then you’ll never stand a chance, even with all the advertising dollars in the world.
Smooth-Sailing EOY Checklist
Be sure to run through these ASAP, and maybe daily for some of the testing… you never know what can just magically break overnight.
Make sure the ad creative you’re launching has matching creative on the landing page or web page it’s driving to. Just by not having a matching visual from the ad to the site page, you’re going to increase your chances of bounce rate right away.
Test every single button, variant selector, image preview and donate page script. To set something up and then assume it’s going to run as-is, with no issues, is like buying a raffle ticket and thinking you’re going to win - it’s delusional. Things break. This is the most stressful time for every single piece of your tech stack, so things will break. Just make sure you’re constantly testing things to make sure they still do what they’re supposed to.
Tag all your donors from now until after the EOY2022 donors. Next year when you’re planning your Giving Tuesday or EOY campaigns, you’ll want to know how your donors from last year did, to give yourself a better understanding of what campaigns worked or didn’t, from an LTV standpoint at the very least.
Don’t forget to push every single promotion, every day, to your organic social channels, especially TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s very normal behavior for someone to jump to your social media to look for a Match offer. Have someone talk through and explain the promotions on Instagram stories as well, not just a graphic with the Match going on. Also, don’t forget to have a LinkTree page or some sort of a link in the bio that works toward a donor getting to the site and Match offer.
Update your email pop-up to reflect the promotion that you’re pushing. If your email pop-up says “Sign up for Impact Matches” during Giving Tuesday, it’s not going to convert as high as “Unlock 2x Match”. The quality of your subscriber might be slightly lower, but tag your Giving Tuesday emails so you can see that over time. Take advantage of the high traffic and high intent at this time of year, it’s not “off-brand."
If you’re running paid ads, there’s a chance that you’re only running a few ads with a URL that you’ll redirect to different pages, so that you don’t have to go through the learning phase again. If you are, then triple check your page redirects on multiple devices and incognito browser windows. Make sure you’re using a URL redirector that updates quickly.
Before you send a ton of emails or traffic, make sure you test your email renders with Litmus and site renders with Browser Stack. You should be able to easily catch mistakes on different browsers, devices, sizes, etc.
Triple-check that all your pixels are live, firing and collecting data on all your pages, including landing pages that might be hosted by another CMS. You can even use the FB Pixel Helper (this is an official Meta product) extension on Chrome and make sure that when you click a button, it verifies that it’s collecting that data.
Interesting Reads & Watches This Week:
Google shared the top 100 most searched products of 2022.
What you need to know about TikTok SEO.
Google believes the future of search is conversational. How did it let OpenAI’s ChatGPT take the lead?
How Amazon Robotics is working on new ways to eliminate the need for barcodes.
Interesting ‘state of digital publishing’ report from Pugpig, which (perhaps) has won the print-to-digital market from Adobe.
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How could I help you in 2023? I use my experience, expertise and network to help mission-driven organizations solve interesting problems and grow.
Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and see you in January!