A few years ago, P&G announced they were scaling back their targeted Facebook ad spending. Since then, they’ve made additional cuts to digital expenditures: $200 million in 2017, $750 million in 2018 (a sizeable portion of which they’d doubtlessly earmarked for digital). P&G made these cuts for a variety of reasons, all of which are high in the funnel and relatively easily addressed by ad vendors and marketing agencies.

Complaints included:

• too many views by the same target customer
• low average view time
• contextual issues (ie., ads appearing in conjunction with controversial or undesirable content)
• too much segmentation (ie., mass media channels reach horizontal audiences better)

Far more interesting than these is P&G’s claim that halving their marketing spending had little impact on overall sales. Consider the scale of that:

P&G — one of the largest ad customers in the world — stopped spending three-quarters of a billion dollars on marketing and saw virtually no impact on sales and growth.

This suggests the disconnect between marketing costs and the value they create may lie outside the funnel entirely. (In a digital context, as I’ll argue, this is almost certainly the case.)

In this reality, what’s the relevance of marketing as a professional practice? When you learn your creative, messaging, ads, and even engagement data couldn’t transform hundreds of millions of dollars into any demonstrable value, what does the next day of your career look like?

Let’s take a trip up that river, into the heart of darkness, and see what we find.

Sometimes marketing is used casually (and synecdochically) with sales — especially in legacy markets — but this is very misleading. Marketing does occupy more of the funnel than it used to, but selling is very much its own discipline (and an important one at that). In the tail-to-tooth framework of business development, one might say marketing is supply and support and sales is combat infantry.

As a day-to-day job, the parole of marketing generally focuses on awareness, messaging, creative, lead flow, and, in progressive organizations, relevant data and analytics. Hence the nature of P&G’s complaints to their agencies and ad vendors. When a company doesn’t meet its goals, marketing stakeholders almost always turn their attention to the top half of the funnel:

• “Should we use other channels?”
• “Could we increase awareness?”
• “Could we build better creative?”
• “Could we drive more engagement?”

The third is perhaps the most seductive and insidious. When people on a marketing team don’t know what else to do, when they really lose their way, they obsess over creative. It’s an opinion-driven democratic space with low barriers to entry, and it’s easy for anyone from the janitor to the CEO to make a contribution. (And it feels so immensely satisfying when you do.)

“What about a green button? That might help. What if we used this picture instead? When was the last time we re-considered our logo? This layout is a little off at this particular resolution. The person in that video is a little young.”

Confusion about correlation and causation (and outright irrelevance), working without some sort of objectivite razor — creative is a dangerous, massive body with a deep gravity well. How many months and years have organizations lost swirling and speghettifying in that loopy eddy, tumbling toward something they can never reach, asking questions that have no answers?

This is the essence of “auteur marketing.” It’s any act motivated by the marketer’s preferences rather than the audience’s desire.

In aesthetics, the ego-centric model has absolute value. Working back from whatever your audience wants is the essence of “selling out.” Conversely, the best marketing gestures are ego-annihilating and organized around what John Keats called “negative capability.” Marketers are the servants of their audiences, and there’s a proportional relationship between the impact a particular marketing act has and the ability of its creator to inhabit the minds, experiences, and desires of the target audience.

Getting the ratio right, wrapping it around a great product, and building a system in which marketing insights and product features continually reinforce one another — this is the molecular structure of exponential value curves. Get the ratio wrong, whether there’s a great product or not, and we find ourselves in the never-was charnel pit of ideas, products, and startups.

“Is this heading for the Louvre?” our team likes to ask itself. “No? That’s fantastic. What a relief. I didn’t really want to compete with Delacroix, David, or da Vinci today anyway.”

“Then let’s build fast and get v.0.1 in front of an audience as quickly as possible.”

That simple mindset allows us to start working back from the audience response as quickly as possible and helps us avoid losing sight of the ultimate role of any marketing asset: customer acquisition. If a video, landing page, ad, image, &c. helps do that, it succeeds and so do we all.

In P&G’s case, as in so many others, obsession with the upper reaches of the funnel is effectively irrelevant. Scraping a huge portion of the machine did nothing to stymie P&G’s growth. As such, it seems unlikely that answering a few questions about awareness and creative, and making a few tweaks here and there, would have had that much of an impact.

We need other answers, other models.

Continuing our trip upriver, as we float deeper into the hazy miasma, let’s free our minds a bit. Moving further and further from the known world, while critters chirp and the water laps our boat and the steam engine hums along, let’s abandon day-to-day occupational concerns. Let’s loosen our grip on material realities and rise to a higher plane. Let’s zoom way, way out and expand the concept of marketing beyond its usual occupational expressions.

Consider the emerging flywheel model. It essentially turns an entire organization into a marketing machine and makes a simple, implicit, and radical point:

Marketing is anything that adds value to an organization.

It can be a landing page, an ad, a conversation, a handshake, a customer service experience, great UI, a follow up call, a discussion over dinner, an efficiency gain, one customer sharing her positive experience with another — any act or asset that attracts new relationships or nurtures and reengages existing ones. It’s less of a professional role or a set of tasks and more of a cultural spirit that pervades, and then exudes from, an organization.

Marketing contributes “over 50% of firm value,” does it? In this model, that seems too low by half. Marketing has become immanent and diffuse. It’s everywhere and in everything. It’s the omnipotent specter of every enterprise.

Like the flywheel model, marketing as an object of analysis — the langue of marketing — is far moreinclusive than marketing-as-parole. Defining it as “the study and management of exchange relationships” gives marketing the standing it needs to frame, influence, and analyze things like customer value. With a seat at the adults’ table, it can say to its sibling disciplines accounting and sales, “I’m more than creative and raw awareness. Like you, I can answer quantitative questions. We have one sap and one root. Let there be commerce between us.”

When it comes to digital marketing in particular, this kind of abstract presence (“I’m everywhere and in everything”) and quantitative standing (“I can do math”) are really important. So let’s leave creative and awareness behind. Let’s go off the grid and float deeper into the jungle outside the pipeline. Let’s go native in that wild place-beyond-parole where sales, accounting, and marketing bleed into one another and Kurtz, prose-poet CMO of his own mad state, freestyles a much deeper truth.

As marketers, this is the frontier space we need to do our best work. No more auteur thinking. No more creative eddies. No more old restrictions and limitations. We’re all the way upriver now, and this is where we belong.

In our search for abstract models and precise quantities that can help liberate us from auteur marketing, perhaps we hear something like the following one evening, as we sit around the campfire with Kurtz. Let’s call it the law of customer value:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

In other words, if you sell goods or services in relatively small quantities and at relatively low price points (“retail”), and your customer conversion rate from digital hovers around 5%, as it almost always will, you should never burn time or money on digital marketing campaigns. It’s unlikely you will see any sort of return on your efforts. (Try it for yourself here.)

In short:

There’s no retail market for digital advertising.

This isn’t a B2B vs. B2C issue. Resorts like our friends at The Hermitage in Nevis, car dealers, rug merchants, and custom suit makers sell to consumers at price points worth thousands of dollars. Google, Alibaba, and Amazon sell a range of services to other businesses for dollars and even pennies.

No, this is very specifically a customer value issue, namely:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

I’m not privy to P&G’s specific sales figures. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the following represents something like an average single-trip shopping list of a typical P&G customer in the United States:

• 1 bottle of Dawn @ $5
• 1 tube of Crest @ $3
• 1 pack of Gillette razors @ $18
• 1 bottle of Tide @ $10

When I get to the register, my bill will be $36. Most of these items will last my household more than a month so let’s assume I repeat this purchase every other month ($36 * 6 = $216). Assuming we’re shopping somewhere that uses a 50% keystone, my gross value to P&G is about $108 per year. (Deduct the cost of ongoing marketing, R&D, and logistics expenses, and we can probably shave off another 20-30%. For simplicity’s sake, I omit these additional costs).

Obviously, family sizes and personal needs differ, but $66.83 billion in sales (P&G’s 2018 gross revenue) in $108 increments would give us about 619 million global customers: ~8% of the world’s population. About half the US population shops at Walmart each week (the world’s largest retailer) so, at ~4.5x that, we’re probably within range for P&G’s total global customer base.

However, even if we double the proposed customer value ($216 / 309 million customers / 4% of the world’s population) or quadruple it ($432 / 155 million customers / 2% of the world’s population), we’re still far below the $750 threshold. In fact, to have an average customer value of $750, P&G would be deriving all their global sales from just 89 million people: .12% of the world’s population, 36% fewer people than shop at Walmart in a given week, roughly the combined populations of California, New York, and Texas.

It would also mean an average consumer purchases something like the following in a year, which seems highly unlikely:

• 150 bottles of Dawn (3 bottles per week)
• 250 tubes of Crest (5 tubes per week)
• 62 packs of Gillette razors (1 pack per week)
• 75 bottles of Tide (1 bottle per week)

Given that it’s likely hundreds of dollars below the ~$750 minimum, P&G made a wise (albeit seemingly radical) choice to cut its digital marketing spending. In fact, it’s hard to see why they or any other retail-focused enterprise would ever spend anything on digital marketing at all. I suspect they knew that there’s no retail market for digital advertising — and pulled, using Scott Galloway‘s phrase, a “gangster marketing move” — before just about anyone else in their weight class wised up.

In a digital context, I’d argue that customer value is the central challenge of marketing. If you can’t align yours with the law above — and you should try to do that before you focus on anything else, before laboring over creative, messaging, awareness, interest, and engagement — it’s best to not engage digital at all. Use your resources elsewhere.

Taking P&G as a case study and (humbly) as a cautionary tale, I’d argue the true issue they faced wasn’t creative-, awareness-, interest-, engagement-, or segmentation-based. Instead, their digital marketing spending simply wasn’t aligned with their average customer value (nor could it ever hope to be). Simply put:

The value of the customer relationships that mass market companies try to build is probably not high enough to justify any sort of digital marketing spend.

Budget was never the problem for P&G. They could throw all the money they liked at digital ads, but because their average customer value is so low, it’s unlikely they’d ever see a demonstrable return on that spend. And if this is true for one of the world’s largest advertisers, it’s safe to assume it’s probably true for all of us:

• for small business owners who operate dry cleaners and car washes, restaurants and local hardware stores
• for those who sell low-cost, non-recurring-revenue items online
• for those who run small-dollar charities and grassroots political campaigns
• for self-published authors and most everyone running a shop situated on the long tail

So where does the law of customer value come from? Why ~$750?

Like all discoveries, these arise from a lot of trial and error, eyestrain, experimentation, some late nights and busy days, and a Gladwellian 10,000 hours of professional practice. In our particular case, we also benefited from aggregated data, a group of adventure-minded customers, and a bunch of spreadsheets that we turned into a free interactive tool.

At GoConvert, we think marketing should focus less on awareness and creative and more on building holistically healthy funnels. That is, you want expenditures at the top of your marketing funnel to have demonstrable returns at the bottom. When this isn’t happening, you want to know why:

• Is it an awareness problem? (“Not enough people know about me.”)
• Is it an interest problem? (“Not enough people are interested in me.”)
• Is it an engagement problem? (“Not enough people are willing to take an action.”)
• Is it a sales problem? (“I’m not doing enough nurturing.”)

Each of these are unique problems with unique solutions, and without visibility into where your challenge(s) lie — into which stage of your funnel is malfunctioning — you’ll likely burn resources trying to fix unrelated things. This is the holistic funnel model of marketing: like any other engine, you need the constituent parts to be firing in tidy, harmonic ratios to achieve a desirable outcome. If one part of the engine isn’t working well, including customer value, the overall machine will not work for you.

The GoConvert application helps customers identify which funnel stages are performing well and which need work:

In the example, we’re showing a strong customer conversion rate and marketing ROI, but both would likely be even higher if we increased interest and engagement and put downward pressure on lead costs (CPR). Our application color codes each pipeline stage against best-practice digital marketing benchmarks, and our corresponding list of insights can help fix common issues associated with each metric and stage. Using GoConvert, our customers and admins know exactly where to focus their attention. As a result, we can keep effort and impact tightly aligned.

However, before we bring organizations like The Hermitage, UNC Charlotte, and Farm Credit of North Carolina to the customer stage, we use our performance calculator to make sure the prospect isn’t violating the law of customer value. If it is, we encourage that prospect to focus its resources elsewhere.

A clockwork mechanism for organizing digital spending, the calculator uses the real-time, ever-changing data of the GoConvert customer network and digital marketing benchmarks to help prospects estimate how well they’d perform as our customer.

Admittedly, at the moment, the output is based on only about a dozen customers and eighteen months’ worth of data. As we add more of each, the results will become more precise. However, after working with a diverse range of customers from a variety of verticals over the past year and a half, we’ve seen one thing very consistently and very clearly:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

Keep in mind that GoConvert consistently (and pretty substantially) outperforms common digital marketing benchmarks. (We’re working on “RCR”: our version of lead conversion rate.) If anything, our numbers represent a best-case scenario, meaning most campaigns that violate the law of customer value (and even some that don’t) are staggering financial bonfires, even when they get close to best-practice digital marketing benchmarks.

Returning to our P&G case study, if the customer goods behemoth had approached us, we would have immediately seen that they violate the law of customer value. No matter how much we’d like to take their money, no matter how large a budget they offered us, we would need to tell them they aren’t a good fit for GoConvert (or, by extension, any digital marketing effort).

Combining P&G’s highest theoretical customer value from above ($432) with a $1 million budget, we see this:

Why is this the case? Because organizations always lose numbers as audiences make their way through the funnel, and customer conversion rates from digital hover around 5%: 100-300% lower than average sales “win” rates of 10-20%.

“I want to see the formulas for the table above.” Download here. “I want to review benchmarks, &c.” Click here. “I want even more documentation.” Email us at info@letsgoconvert.com. We have a lot.

For a digital campaign to generate sufficient ROI — that is, generate more money at the bottom than went in the top — we must harmonize the ratios between metrics like awareness, click through rates, lead conversion rates, and customer value.

Digital marketing is a system with fairly predictable outcomes. Long-standing digital marketing benchmarks like these would be familiar to just about any digital marketer worth his or her salt. Even if we can’t say digital offers single, defined points of “truth,” it does offer abstract, recurring ranges, scatter fields that appear regardless of industry, vertical, or target audience.

Ebb and flow, tidal gravity, ecological balance — these are primal forces of nature, as another Kurtz figure reminds us. They cannot be controlled, but they can be respected and accommodated. We can supplicate ourselves to them and be rewarded. Or we can shake our fist at them and be punished. Because of these forces, no amount of budget thrown into the funnel will generate a positive ROI if your customer value isn’t high enough.

Note that P&G’s $200 million returns the same as $1 million:

Budget isn’t the issue. Customer value is. If it isn’t high enough, you’ll always lose money when spending on digital.

To see the inverse, consider one of GoConvert’s customers. It has a customer value just shy of $2k. Spending $199,998,000 fewer dollars than P&G, this customer has a reasonable expectation that it can generate a positive ROI from digital marketing spending:

Imagine being in our position, and you begin to understand the paradoxical, counterintuitive landscape of digital marketing that one finds upriver.

The GoConvert sales team should turn away one of the largest advertisers in the world (P&G). Unless they can work on increasing their customer value, it would be irresponsible for us to work with them, no matter how much money they gave us. But we can help just about any businesses with any budget that also has a > $750 customer value generate solid returns from their marketing spending.

Why? Because digital marketing is not about budget. It’s about customer value:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

P&G effectively underwrote a mass-media money furnace for 75 years. That system privileged awareness and reach above all else. And awareness and reach, unlike authentic interest, engagement, and conversions, can be purchased. When P&G and other legacy companies turn the 20th-century playbook to digital, very little happens unless it’s also yoked to higher-than-retail customer values.

As such, if Facebook asks you if you want to boost a post, remind yourself:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

Want to test some keyword ads on Google? Ok. But first, remind yourself:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

Get an email from a PPC vendor who promises to help you reach hundreds of thousands of people in a targeted network of relevant prospects? Fantastic. But first, remind yourself:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

See an interesting, relevant publication that offers diverse forms of exposure to its readers? Exciting opportunity! But, again, first, remind yourself:

If your customer value is ~$750 or less, it’s virtually impossible to generate any positive ROI from your digital marketing spending.

Boost posts all you want. Drive all the clicks and traffic and awareness you want. Position yourself to targeted audiences. But unless you have a higher-than-retail customer value, it’s likely going to be a wasted effort. First, focus on boosting your customer value through transaction frequency or transaction value. (Simply adding more customers of the same value isn’t likely to help.) Then, once you’re north of the ~$750 dead zone, you’ll be ready to initiate a digital marketing spend that has a reasonable ROI expectation.

When you get to that point, be sure to contact us. We’ve made it upriver, and we’re ready to help.

In January of last year, Studio Hyperset launched MarketingPlanner.io: a free, easy-to-use marketing intelligence tool. This tool has two primary functions:

• It allows businesses, creative professionals, and other individuals to build highly personalized marketing plans that align with current trends and best-practices.
• It generates up-to-date, front-line data that can help answer questions such as, “What are the most popular and effective marketing techniques?” and “What do other businesses spend on marketing?”

In theory, these two goals perpetually reinforce one another: as individual users interact with the tool, the aggregate data improves; as the aggregate data improves, individual plans become more effective. In this way, it’s our hope MarketingPlanner.io creates a steady in- and outbound flow of actionable marketing intelligence.

Each month, we publish an update on the MarketingPlanner.io blog. This update contains aggregate data about the ways in which users engaged with the tool during the previous month. By summarizing and aggregating user activity from the previous year, it’s our hope annual updates like this one will help identify trends and develop even more comprehensive sets of actionable intelligence.

Personal and corporate brands, bloggers and social media influencers, agencies and marketing professionals, businesses in traditional and cutting-edge industries, education entities and other non-profits — MarketingPlanner.io served a diverse range of users in 2017. Going forward, we hope both the tool and these reports will continue helping growth-focused professionals reach their goals faster, make more informed decisions, and market more effectively.

In 2017, MarketingPlanner.io hosted 2,171 unique visitors from 1,181 total cities around the world. This is an average of 181 visitors and 98 cities per month. In the first quarter of 2017, we ran search engine and social media ads to support the tool. Approximately 1,011 (46.56%) of visitors arrived as a result of these paid campaigns. The others visits were organic.

The majority of our visits — 1,588 (73.15%) — originated in the United States. Major urban areas in the southwest and northeast accounted for, perhaps, 25-30% of visits. The others were spread fairly evenly across the rest of the United States. Every market save the following six accounted for < 2% of total visitor traffic.

• New York (15.93%)
• Los Angeles (8.19%)
• Washington, DC (5.54%)
• The Bay Area (2.58%)
• Chicago (2.52%)
• Dallas-Ft. Worth (2.14%)

121 visitors from around the world created marketing plans. This gives MarketingPlanner.io a conversion rate of 5.6%.

78% of these users are located in the United States. User location trends largely mirror those of visitors. However, while visitors were largely urban and concentrated in major coastal markets, our user base is more geographically diverse. About half our American users live in rural areas in the interior of the country and regional capitals like Columbus, Ohio and Wichita, Kansas.

With a few exceptions, this is true internationally as well. For example, instead of London, Stockholm, and Milan, we have users in Northhampton, Falköping, and Bologna.

MarketingPlanner.io users had average revenue, budgets, or funding resources of $702,313.08, and they planned to spend an average of $64,132.92 (9.13%) on marketing. However, when responding to the question, “What percentage of your annual revenue, budget, or funding would you like to dedicate to marketing?,” users suggested they planned to budget an average of 8.25%.

8.25-9.13% is substantially higher than the 2-5% that the US Small Business Administration recommends for organizations that generate < $1mil/year. While we don't know how old our users' organizations are, these rates are more in line with Entrepreneur‘s recommendation that businesses 5 years or older spend 6-12% on marketing.

User marketing plans were dominated by digital, content, and field-marketing techniques, specifically, on websites, social media, downloadable eBooks and reports, and events and trade shows. Unsurprisingly, given the fact that our users tend to live in rural areas and small/midsize cities, local partnerships also performed well.

We’ve adjusted MarketingPlanner.io’s effectiveness scores so they reflect these user preferences as well as the 2017 results of our on-going survey. At the moment, menu items with the top ten highest effectiveness scores follow:

• Website & SEO
• Social Media Marketing (Paid)
• Partnerships (Local)
• eBooks, Guides, Case Studies & Reports
• Events & Trade Shows
• Social Media Posts (Organic)
• Email Marketing
• Web Videos
• Mass Mailings (Print)
• Research, Strategy & Analysis

Calling all heroes!

Help fine-tune MarketingPlanner.io’s effectiveness scores, and improve everyone’s marketing plan. (Including your own!)

The majority of MarketingPlanner.io visitors and users are young and mid-career professionals aged 25-44 who work at small businesses and startups. (Our largest user budget is $25millon. Only thirteen of 121 are > $1million.) These professionals demonstrate an affinity for technology and business as well as for travel, media (especially film and music), investing, and lifestyle experiences.

Interestingly, MarketingPlanner.io visitors and users are slightly more likely to be female (52.37%) than male (47.63%). While our current data set is small, this may suggest women have a good bit of control over the marketing budgets of small and early-stage enterprises.

In 2018, our goals for MarketingPlanner.io follow:

• MarketingPlanner.io is clearly a small business tool. As a result, user data tends to be more aspirational than experiential. That is, plans and menu selections often reflect what people with less experience hope to accomplish rather than what people with more experience know will work. We need to improve the way we communicate the value of MarketingPlanner.io to marketing experts at larger enterprises. When these users begin adding regular input into the system, the usefulness of the effectiveness scores and the quality of the outbound, aggregate data will likely improve. (It may be we need to develop a unique version of the tool for users at large enterprises.)
• To improve the reliability of our effectiveness scores, we need to boost the number of survey responses, especially among experienced professionals at larger enterprises.
• We’d like to answer important questions raised by the 2017 data: “Do women tend to control the marketing budgets of small businesses?” and “How old are our users’ organizations?”
• We need to incentivize visitors and users to share the tool more widely and evangelize on its behalf. This should boost the MarketingPlanner.io conversion rate and thereby increase the quantity of data flowing into the system.
• We need to find reliable ways to encourage repeat visits to, and uses of, the tool. At the moment, most users build plans with which they never re-engage. We want MarketingPlanner.io to be an integral part of users’ routine marketing workflows, and we want all plans to serve as up-to-date reflections of users’ current marketing activities.

Whether you need to build, enhance, or optimize your organization’s marketing plan, MarketingPlanner.io can help. It’s free and easy to use.

Seerene is a global business intelligence firm whose platform helps organizations monitor their engineering capacity and software codebases. In the first and second quarters of 2017, Studio Hyperset helped Seerene build a new trilingual marketing website to support its customer acquisition efforts in the US, Germany, and Hong Kong.

Not long after launch, Seerene decided it wanted to target potential customers on the Chinese mainland as well. However, because of the “Great Firewall” (GFW) and the fact that the Chinese mainland has some of the slowest average broadband connection speeds in the world, we struggled to serve the existing site there with any sort of reliability. Unlike the thousands of sites that Chinese authorities actively block, Seerene’s site contains no subversive content, eCommerce elements, or user-registration mechanisms. Nevertheless, because it’s hosted in an American data center and deployed via a content delivery network (CDN) with points of presence (PoP) outside the Chinese mainland, prospective customers in places like Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing routinely experienced both performance issues and incidental GFW blockage when trying to visit seerene.com

To serve Seerene’s website to visitors on the Chinese mainland in a reliable way, we knew we needed to host it in a data center located there. But we soon discovered that the political and technological regulations China imposes on its mainland network make launching even a basic marketing website challenging. Doing so involves a number of steps that are unnecessary most everywhere else in the world.

A basic Google search for “how to launch a Chinese website” or “how do I launch a Chinese website” will return a good number of helpful resources that summarize the steps involved.

Chao Cheng, “Thirty Six Things to Check Before Launching a Website in China.” Sinostep. Accessed August 09, 2017.

“International Website Optimization: Chinese Site Launch.” KoMarketing Associates. Accessed August 09, 2017.

Alex Nam, “Getting it Right First Time: How to Launch Websites in China.” Digital Marketing Magazine. September 14, 2016. Accessed August 09, 2017.

Chao Cheng, “Checklist before you launch your Chinese website.” China Business Forum. Accessed August 10, 2017.

Rebecca Li, “Best Practices for Launching Your China Website.” China Briefing. May 22, 2015. Accessed August 09, 2017.

Olivier Verot, “What you need to know before creating your website in China.” Marketing to China. May 14, 2014. Accessed August 10, 2017.

When building a plan for Seerene, we consulted these kinds of resources as well as several members of our professional network who have experience working in China. While this expertise was enormously helpful, our team couldn’t help but feel the process we inherited was, for the most part, poorly documented and needlessly confusing. As such, while there’s certainly no shortage of “how to’s” concerned with launching websites on the Chinese mainland, we hope the solution we outline below is the clearest and most comprehensive of the lot.

The steps and best-practices associated with launching a website on the Chinese mainland fall into six categories. While most of the items in the following checklist aren’t strictly contingent on the others, we’ve nevertheless tried to organize it linearly. That is, if organizations start at the top of the checklist and work their way to the bottom, they should find the process runs as smoothly as possible.

Infographic

Mainland China’s slow broadband connection speeds and “Great Firewall” make it challenging to launch websites there. However, this checklist should help your organization get its site up and running quickly.

Step One: Infrastructure

Step Two: Administration

Step Three: Marketing

Step Four: Content

“I want to quickly scan my Chinese website for sensitive content.”

If you have a WordPress website, we’ve created a free plugin that can help you easily scan your site for sensitive content. After launch, use it to routinely scan your site and ensure blogging activity, comments, and routine edits haven’t added any new sensitive content.

Step Five: Web Development (Launch Prep)

Step Six: Web Development (Post Launch)

In January of 2017, Studio Hyperset launched its interactive marketing plan tool: MarketingPlanner.io. Free and easy-to-use, this tool allows users to build, enhance, and optimize their organizations’ marketing plans. Since its release, dozens of visitors have used the tool to create marketing plans, and this activity generates a good deal of important aggregate data. This data includes hard-to-find, actionable marketing intelligence focused on marketing trends, marketing budgets, and popular marketing methods.

Each month, we’ll be posting an update to the MarketingPlanner.io blog. This update will contain aggregate data about the ways in which users engaged with the marketing plan tool during the previous month.

In March, for example, 131 visitors from 51 cities around the world had average marketing budgets of $81,333 and planned to spend 6% of their total revenue on marketing. In time, this data will allow us to publish annual reports and track marketing trends, marketing budgets, and popular marketing methods year-over year. If you’re interested in the most popular forms of marketing and the average budget for each type, check out the March report using the button below.

We hope this marketing plan report will be a valuable source of marketing intelligence for anyone interested in marketing data.

MarketingPlanner.io can help you build, enhance, or optimize your organization’s marketing plan. It’s free and easy to use, and it offers users the ability to set a custom marketing plan budget and select from a diverse menu of marketing initiatives. These include traditional mass media options (such as radio and television ads) and progressive online, content-based options (such as podcasting, ebooks, and infographics).

To learn more about our cost formula and effectiveness scores as well as the resources we used to frame the tool, please visit the marketing plan’s “Methodology & Resources” section. You can also help us fine-tune the effectiveness scores by taking our survey.

In the fall of 2014, Studio Hyperset began working with a SaaS company whose solution helps B2B companies transform prospect data into actionable sales and marketing intelligence. Our client’s total addressable market is worth $1billion+/year, and they’ve received venture funding from firms such as Sutter Hill Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Redpoint Ventures.

Like most venture-backed SaaS companies, our client’s forward momentum depends on accelerating customer acquisition and increasing recurring revenue. To stimulate this process, leadership tasks the marketing team with generating leads that the sales team can nurture and convert. Once converted, knowledge about kinetic customer relationships flows back to the marketing team so it can focus its efforts, refine collateral, and generate more qualified leads.

In addition to building and continually developing its marketing and podcast websites, Studio Hyperset developed three interactive content resources that help the client nurture, convert, and learn from customer relationships.

First, an interactive ROI calculator uses a two-step process to communicate the value of the client’s offering. Step one allows prospective customers to calculate the cost of low-value leads that were unlikely to convert.

Step two illustrates the potential revenue increase users can expect to see when using the client’s solution.

Second, we helped the client develop a lead-generation tool called the “Score-o-Matic.” In addition to generating potential customer connections, the Score-o-Matic also acts as a solution preview. Requiring nothing more than an email address, it illustrates the ways the client’s solution uses a number of signals to evaluate and score leads.

The client uses the Score-o-Matic in a number of ways. It helps the marketing team funnel organic website leads to the sales team, and it helps the sales team illustrate the solution to interested prospects. At trade shows and conferences, it serves as an engaging booth resource. Projected onto a large screen, it helps field marketers raise awareness, generate interesest, and enter attendee leads into the client’s sales funnel.

Third, we helped the client develop a WordPress plugin that allows marketing operations teams to periodically test their site forms and ensure they’re operating properly. When site forms fail — because of scripting errors, bad code commits, third-party errors, &c. — they often do so silently and without notice. This state of affairs risks interrupting pay-per-click campaigns, other lead generation efforts, and, ultimately, wasting resources.

Our client’s plugin helps automate the form-testing process. Users can simply upload a CSV filled with pages that contain forms; schedule daily, weekly, or monthly tests; and automatically have reports delivered to the inbox of their choice.

As a utility marketing resource, the plugin allows the client to make meaningful, data-generating connections with plugin users. Specifically, it helps the client:

• increase awareness, connection, and conversion opportunities
• generate leads for its sales team and marketing automation workflows
• increase organic discovery opportunities and backlink authority (via wordpress.org)

Both the Score-o-Matic and form monitor plugin also send a range of engagement, location, and contact data to Pardot. In addition to helping the sales team nurture and convert leads, this intelligence helps the marketing team learn valuable lessons and ensure its strategies, efforts, and collateral resources are tailored to its most successful customer relationships.

• marketing website
• podcast website
• ROI calculator
• Score-o-Matic
• Automated Form Monitor WordPress plugin

Over the past twenty years, campaign finance in the United States has become increasingly focused on political action committees. Super PAC’s can engage in unlimited political spending and raise funds from whomever they like without any legal limit on donation size. And while traditional PAC’s generally receive lower-dollar donations, make lower-dollar contributions, and have more restrictions on their activities, both types of PAC are almost entirely financed by small groups of wealthy donors.

After the 2016 presidential election, a member of our professional network felt compelled to give small-dollar donors a larger voice in the political process. He outlined his vision to us, and in January 2017, we began building the following solution.

Repair Congress is a special kind of political action committee. Instead of raising money from a few wealthy donors, it pools small-dollar donations and amplifies their effect using knowledge about likely voter preferences. The solution we built uses four features to raise awareness, collect and boost donations, drive engagement, and determine how PAC funds should be spent:

When they first set up accounts, we use a series of screens to ask prospective PAC contributors to select issues, Congressional districts, Senate races, and candidates that interest them. Automatically populated and kept up to date by a collection of API integrations, these screens allow us to gather actionable data about the interests and preferences of likely voters.

Following Wikipedia’s donor model, we then invite prospective donors to make small-dollar, one-time or recurring donations to support the PAC’s efforts:

After they donate, we use a feature called “5×5” to encourage social sharing. This feature encourages each donor to donate $5 and to share the PAC with at least 5 friends. Beginning at 5⁸, this has the potential to attach hundreds of thousands of voices to Repair Congress and raise millions of dollars to support its efforts.

After the 5×5 process, each donor receives a personalized homepage — like this one — that contains a personal statement and lists successful referrals, the user’s 5×5 score, and the issues, elections, and candidates the donor cares about. This page has both public and private elements, and all users have the ability to log back into their pages, adjust their selections, and manage their contributions.

Long-term, we plan to engage Repair Congress’ donor community using a variety of content offerings, including those focused on:

• aggregate donor reports that outline preference, donation, and geographical trends
• issues, races, and candidates the PAC has decided to support
• new issues we add to the system
• relevant candidate and race updates

Building the following deliverables gave Studio Hyperset the opportunity to serve both CPO and CMO roles:

• application wireframes and data generation/UX strategy
• web application
• content strategy

For some time now, a national tourism authority in the Leeward Islands has used traditional mass media efforts, tourism-focused events, and email newsletters as its primary marketing efforts. In 2016, the board decided it wanted to supplement these efforts with a range of digital initiatives aimed at:

Thanks to a referral from our professional network, the tourism authority asked Studio Hyperset to help with these initiatives. In January of 2017, we began working on the following solution.

Studio Hyperset used four distinct phases of action to build a solution for the tourism authority.

During the first phase, we explored all Google Analytics data generated by the tourism authority’s marketing website in 2016. At the time, this was the most comprehensive set of online marketing data available. This deep dive allowed us to identify important information about site visitors including:

• location information
• traffic sources
• browsing habits, interests, and trends

For example, we found that 87.35% of visits to the site originated in just five countries. We also found 50% of American traffic originates in eleven major urban areas, 45% of UK regional traffic originates in three major urban areas, and 45% of Canadian regional traffic originates in seven major urban areas.

Other important findings follow:

• We discovered that most site visitors — especially those from Canada, the US, and UK — are first-time (vs. returning). As a result, we know the site has substantial engagement opportunities.
• We were able to create a list of sources, mediums, and social networks that funnel each national group to the site. This helped us choose content partners and select platforms on which to publish.
• We were able to create a list of keywords and pages popular with each national group. This helped us fine-tune our understanding of likely travelers’ interests.

In phase two, we used this aggregate information to build portraits of three broad tourist types: Caribbean “locals” from other Leeward Islands, Americans from the contiguous United States, and “Commonwealth visitors” from the UK and Canada. While they overlap in some cases, we used these portraits to create a content and platform strategy focused on the behavior, interests, motivations, and concerns of each traveler type. For example, the following Venn diagram illustrates the mutual and unique content interests of each traveler type.

In phase three, we used these personae portraits and our other phase two conclusions to create strategy-driven social media posts, which we began publishing on platforms known to be popular with the three visitor types. As the following table from February 2017 illustrates, each month we track raw, aggregate post engagement:

Once per month, we include this information in a report that includes detailed demographic and location information about the tourism authority’s social media connections. This combined report is a strategic workhorse. It allows us to:

• identify popular partner targets and post themes
• draw important conclusions about the efficacy of our efforts
• identify popular platforms, markets, and demographic targets for paid campaigns
• create a feedback loop that helps fine-tune messaging effectiveness and ensure traveler profiles are as accurate as possible
• identify popular messaging for the tourism authority’s other marketing outreach efforts

Our first-quarter data was unambiguous: the tourism authority’s most popular posts appear on Instagram and focus on dining opportunities and island events and activities. In stage four, we were able to use this data to design a paid Instagram ad campaign focused on likely summer travelers. When interested visitors click the ad, they’re directed to an interactive, mobile-first landing page.

This page has the following goals:

• connect and generate conversations between interested travelers and service vendors on the island
• increase summer travel to the island by highlighting events, activities, and dining opportunities travelers will encounter on the island during the summer months
• gather actionable intelligence about the interests, needs, and demographics of the island’s typical summer traveler that can be used to inform future campaigns, marketing efforts, content offerings, and social media activities
• make meaningful connections with travelers that the tourism authority and its partners (resorts, airlines, tours, restaurants, &c.) can use in conversion efforts and future marketing campaigns


The following flowchart represents the ways the various campaign elements work together to drive traffic, sharing activity, and conversion events for the tourism authority and its partners.

When the summer travel campaign ended in late July, we discovered several interesting and valuable things:

• Pre-campaign, anecdotal evidence suggested most people who visited the island in the summer were from metro areas in the US state of Texas. As such, originally, we focused the campaign on Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, and Austin. However, after a few weeks, we saw very little engagement from these areas. The same was true of other areas we tried targeting including Toronto, Las Vegas, Baltimore, Virginia/Washington DC, Chicago, Boston, France, and Costa Rica.
• Instead, as the campaign proceeded, we found the summer travel campaign was most popular with middle-aged women in the London and NYC metro areas as well as the Gold Coast of Florida. The tourism authority was aware of its popularity in the first two areas, but the third was virtually undiscovered and untapped. The Gold Coast of Florida was incredibly efficient as well: the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce DMA’s contributed more leads with fewer visits and less time spent on the site. 
• Additionally, we found Puerto Rico contributed almost as much traffic as London, NYC, and the Gold Coast of Florida combined but only two leads. Our conclusion was that the island must enjoy a good bit of awareness in Puerto Rico but, perhaps due to the economic conditions there, most residents aren’t able to travel as widely as they might like. Given the clear demand, though, it might be worthwhile for the tourism authority to work with its partners to build a discounted travel package and offer it exclusively to residents of Puerto Rico.

As such, in addition to summer-travel-specific, immediate-term lead gains, the campaign data also helps focus the tourism authority’s broad-based, on-going marketing efforts. In addition to uncovering a valuable new market, the tourism authority can use campaign data to fine-tune its mass media efforts, make its marketing spending more efficient, and improve the chances of boosting that spending’s ROI.

Beyond the campaign, the tourism authority’s general Google Analytics and social media data allowed us to standardize lead stages; improve lead flows; scope a WiFi-based, lead-generating login system; and propose email content adjustments that emphasize social media content and encourage engagement activity.

• data-driven social media posts
• monthly intelligence reports
• campaign landing page
• lead stage/flow funnel visualization
• email engagement workflow visualization
• WiFi lead capture plan
• interactive, lead-generating landing page

Every day, offshore oil rig operators such as Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Baker Hughes charter vessels from marine transportation companies such as Harvey Gulf, Adriatic, and SeaTran. For the most part, both parties gather information and negotiate charter agreements using static PDF spec sheets, word-of-mouth, phone conversations, email chains, and other ad hoc techniques. Because these techniques aren’t scalable, auditable, or synchronous, they create a number of frustrations and inefficiencies, facilitate unethical behavior, and often sour otherwise healthy professional relationships.

Operators routinely find that vessels have outdated spec sheets, are double booked, or have ambiguous availability schedules. Moreover, as they attempt to negotiate and secure vessel charters, both supply-chain personnel and salespeople waste hours each week emailing, making phone calls, and performing other unproductive tasks. As the following outlines, these communication inefficiencies have the potential to drive thousands of dollars worth of wasteful spending each month.

Dissatisfied by the status quo, in March of 2016 a marine transportation company in the US Gulf Coast expressed an interest in building an enterprise application that would solve these challenges. Thanks to a referral from our professional network, this company hired Studio Hyperset to help turn its vision into a reality.

Studio Hyperset used three distinct phases of action to build the solution. In addition to handling the budgeting, revenue analysis, and market research duties typically managed by the CEO, these phases allowed us to serve both a CPO and CMO role.

During the first phase, we developed a portrait of the application’s total and service addressable markets. This included gathering data on the locations of the application’s likely user base, the number and location of offshore oil platforms around the world, and the average fleet size of marine transportation companies around the world. We also developed persona sketches of each user group, including an overview of the needs, interests, and purchasing habits of platform operators and vessel owners. Lastly, we used market data to create recurring revenue projections based on different pricing structures, SAM penetration ratios, and burn rates.

During the second phase, we used the knowledge we developed during the first to design a logo, wireframe the solution’s user interface, and build its solution stack. Relying on resources such as Ionic, Kinvey, and a series of third-party API integrations, we built the stack with an eye to medium-term scalability and rapid, cost-effective development.

During the third phase, we (a) used our second-phase resources to build the application itself and (b) our first-phase knowledge resources to build a range of marketing collateral intended to support user acquisition efforts.

• C-level handbook containing all user, market, and revenue data from phase one
• Application website, including all graphics, messaging, sales tools, and user-support resources
• iPhone/iPad version of the application itself

At a high level, the solution Studio Hyperset delivered:

• streamlines charter-related communications between offshore oil rig operators and marine transportation companies
• standardizes vessel data
• introduces oversight into the sales process
• places marine transportation companies’ vessel inventories directly in front of potential buyers
• offers offshore oil rig operators a more precise sense of vessel availability
• allows offshore oil rig operators and marine transportation companies to negotiate charter schedules and rates
• creates substantial time- and cost-savings opportunities for boat owners and platform operators
• offers users real-time information about vessel availability
• helps operators find available vessels quickly and easily

When scoping the marketing plan tool, we found assigning costs to the menu items was a difficult challenge. Costs can vary substantially between industries and vendors, and attempting to assign costs to abstract items like “partnerships” with a simple (daresay reductive) dollar amount is virtually impossible.

As a solution, we’ve instead set costs using a simple, user-focused formula. This formula factors in:

• a user’s gross revenue, budget, or funding
• his/her target marketing budget
• an “effectiveness” score

Regarding the effectiveness score, we’ve assigned each menu item an ascending value of 0-50. (Higher scores indicate increased effectiveness.) This score plays an important role in the costs users see.

We developed this scale, and assigned each menu item a value, using our experience, that of our clients, and a selection of content resources. As we develop the marketing plan tool, we’ll be fine-tuning this score using visitor data and feedback as well as any additional content resources we discover.

In addition to solving the arbitrary cost problem, we hope this cost model helps users generate highly personal plans based on their specific budgets and goals. We also hope these weights give users not only an idea of raw dollars-and-cents cost — which can be misleading and reductive in this context — but also a sense of the weighted value of each menu item.

In an absolute sense, podcasts, for example, may cost less to create and syndicate than mass media ads. But, as one of the most effective items on our menu, the organization would do well to commit more of its marketing budget to podcasts than mass media ads.

This “smart spend” argument is implicit in the costs users see.

To learn more about our cost formula and effectiveness scores as well as the resources we used to frame the tool, please visit the marketing plan’s “Methodology & Resources” section. You can also help us fine-tune the effectiveness scores by taking our survey.

Project management best practices, frameworks, policies, and workflows can help organizations of all sizes operate more efficiently. By establishing ultra-responsive support and operations frameworks, these systems can also help minimize a number of common frustrations associated with professional relationships:

• tangled email chains
• endless follow ups
• unresponsive talent and disengaged leadership
• strategic confusion and tactical gaps

In addition to serving as a formal check against chaos, project management best practices can also put tremendous downward pressure on development and review cycles, increase speed to market, and streamline the processes of solving complex challenges.

I’d argue, however, that their primary purpose is actually much warmer:

By facilitating high-quality professional relationships and maximizing satisfaction and intended results, systems developed around project management best practices make customers and teammates feel that they’re an organization’s most important assets, which, of course, they are.

Like a critical reader, great project managers focus on creating greater clarity than would otherwise exist. The role’s special genius lies in transforming noise into harmonized order and creating a space in which all kinds of professional gestures can flourish. Challenging works of art without insightful annotations are just jumbles of signs. Likewise, projects without adequate leadership are almost always nightmares of entropy.

Project managers are heroes in the most ancient senses of the word: “defenders,” “protectors,” “watch-keepers,” “brave-ones.” In this role, they prevent problems from happening and solve them when they arise. They’re the essential connection between customers and talent resources and facilitate the building of bridges outward to audiences.

I’ve organized this post and our project management best practices eBook around the following core project management values:

• balance
• order
• clarity
• gentility
• grace

Each outlines four “noble truths” of project management as the SH team and I understand them as well as some specific tactics and modular elements that can help keep any operations pipeline running as smoothly as possible.

We’ve gained these insights and built our project management solution stack through trial-and-error, hard work, team discussions, reading and research, personal experience, and a lot of client and teammate patience. We hope taking an “open source” approach to these systems will help teammates, clients, and service vendors build great professional relationships by establishing better communications systems earlier and faster.

We use minimum constructive dialogue to achieve maximum results. We want to be responsive and action-oriented without fatiguing clients with too much dialogue or over-sharing. This is true in the best of times, but it’s most important in the worst.

When a client project becomes ultra-chaotic or ultra-dysfunctional, we generally decrease our outbound, client-facing chatter to a minimum. (Internal, teammate chatter may increase quite a bit, of course.) No matter how chaotic the incoming communications flow becomes, we:

• use lean, direct language to reassure clients we’re in control of the situation
• receive all information and organize it behind the scenes
• quietly and effectively execute whatever can be executed without client involvement
• document and organize all client-facing questions and issues (which we’ll revisit with the client once the chaos dies down)

In these situations, we strive to become tranquil receptors of information rather than broadcasters of it. Instead of making a dysfunctional situation worse, our goal is to absorb the chaos, control and organize the dialogue, and help successfully resolve the situation so the larger project can proceed.

We want to make sure both (a) the overall project status and (b) the status of individual action items are transparent and self-evident. Within a few moments of reading, anyone attached to a project should be able to independently discover:

• the overall project status
• the status of a given action item and, if it’s open, why it hasn’t yet been completed

Admittedly, there’s an inherent conflict between the “Not too chatty” and “Let there be light” principles. They’re in constant dialogue with one another, and it’s the project manager’s job to decide how to strike the most constructive balance between the two.

As a result of the “Not too chatty” principle, a client might not see every discussion or to do. For example, Basecamp — the client-facing portion of our project management stack — allows us to select which content clients can and cannot see, and keeping some activity private (in Basecamp and Slack) allows us to prevent overwhelming clients with dialogue.

As businesses grow and projects increase in complexity, gaps begin to form between important silos and the players in those silos:

• between marketing and sales
• between marketing and production
• between engineering and marketing
• between leadership and talent

The list goes on and on. And as project managers, it’s our job to mind these gaps, anticipate any potential communications shortfalls, bridge any kinetic communications shortfalls, and build systems that constantly improve alignment and clarity.

Whether they’re structural or temporary, cultural or project-based, most all gaps are communication- and knowledge-based. Monitoring the “Let there be light” spectrum helps prevent gaps from forming among day-to-day players. However, to prevent gaps from forming between “satellite” players — most often those in management- and command-level roles — we often create summaries filled with scope information, outlines of logical build phases, and lists of elements in play.

In a few moments of reading, anyone attached to the project can quickly close whatever knowledge- and communication-gaps they have by reviewing these summaries.

Being as ultra-responsive as it’s constructive to be — this is our client-facing goal. We never want to be the cause of a bottleneck, and our ideal operational state involves awaiting client feedback. No client should spend more time than is absolutely necessary anticipating an update or deliverable from us.

Ensuring all participants have access to the same set of up-to-date information neutralizes common, frustrating bottlenecks associated with sharing (and re-sharing) account usernames and passwords, file and repository links, FTP and SSL information, and other utility data.

Dated, well-organized to do lists with prioritized tasks are pipeline workhorses. Properly managed, they can help transform the narrowest funnels into the highest-capacity pipes.