Where to Spend Your Marketing Budget: Part 1

A successful viral video with millions of views is every business owner’s dream. Think of Dollar Shave Club’s video, which gained almost 24 million views. They practically did little else with their marketing. But here’s the catch: for every video that goes trending, thousands of others fail.

Taking your marketing budget to your creative agency and saying, “Create me a viral video,” is like buying a ticket to the lottery and expecting to win. Glenn Bartlett, Head of Strategy at Step Change, warns, “Creating a viral video is not a good place to start.”

Glenn shares that although creating a great video is excellent for your marketing plan, every leader in an organisation should follow a framework instead in order for the marketing efforts to succeed. The framework is called RAMM: result, audience, message, and medium.

So if creating a viral video is not the first step, what’s the first thing to consider then? Begin with knowing the results you’re after. Once you get clear on your goal, what you want to achieve, then you also need to identify who you’re speaking to. Don’t say, “Let’s appeal to everyone” as everyone is tantamount to no one. You want to be targeting the smallest audience.

How do you know what messages to spend your money on? Spend your money on a message where you have an advantage and your customers care about it. You need to be very deliberate around your audience and in choosing what to say to them before committing your money or even thinking about the medium.

Now you’re ahead of most businesses —you’ve thought about the result you want, identified your target audience, and determined what to say to them. The last step is to decide how you get to them (medium).

Stay tuned for the next blog posts in this series that will go deep on how to identify your audience, how to determine what message to put out there, and what kinds of medium you can use for your marketing efforts.