80/20 — Six

A winning campaign strategy

Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash

Many different strategies can stand behind an excellent advertising campaign. Today, I’m going to talk about one that I’ve found to be particularly effective in the online world.

Before I dive in, allow me to state two basic assumptions.

Assumption #1: Always on

Your advertising campaign is always-on. You are always, or almost always, spending money to promote your message. Even if it’s just a minimal investment behind paid search advertising, or promoted social media posts.

Why? Because this gives you the chance to leverage ongoing learning and data to optimize your campaign. If you’re looking to boost your KPIs in a crowded media space, you need to be in-market and in front of the right people at the right time, which requires constant experimentation and adaptation.

Assumption #2: Agility

Your team is agile enough to react to the feedback from your advertising in a timely manner. If you think your organization is too large to be nimble? Re-consider your team structure. Being able to ditch what doesn’t work and improve on what does is key to success.

80/20

Now for the 80/20 strategy. It’s a budget allocation framework to specific channels: 80% to the first and 20% to the second. Depending on your product and our target market, you should be able to easily determine which channel mix will tell your story more effectively to your target audience:

1. Sure thing budget. Say you have determined that being on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) and on Facebook’s timeline are good places to find people who are interested in your product or service, based on past experience or your audience profile. You allocate about 80% of your media budget to those channels.
2. Experiments budget. In any campaign you allocate a certain budget towards experimentation. This might be towards new channels, creative formats, or ways. Here I’m suggesting a 20% budget allocation.

Now, how often should you experiment?

Six

That’s where the six comes in. I recommend a six-week cycle of experimentation. With digital media, specifically digital media, six weeks is a good timeframe to capture feedback and incorporate changes.

The fine print

This framework comes with a few caveats:

• Your media mix may not allow for an 80–20 split. Some channels are more expensive than others, so you may have to reserve a small chunk of the pie for experimentation.
• Six weeks may not be enough time to collect data — if your geographic reach is small you may not be able to generate critical mass in six weeks, and need to experiment for longer (although if you’re testing online advertising for more than 10 weeks, it’s not really a test any longer).
• Your internal business reporting cycle may conflict with this model.

The critical takeaways are:

1. Use the bulk of your advertising dollars for what you know are the sure things
2. Always use a small percentage to try new tactics
3. Repeatedly test and refine the new tactics, moving them into the ‘sure thing’ bucket as you see success

How do you manage your advertising campaigns?

Do you set aside budget dollars for experimentation and improvement?