The "if this, then that" of marketing

In 2016 I started working at a small advertising shop called ClickRabbit. They had two branches, one in Florida and one in the UK. When I started I had very little advertising knowledge and honestly, it was hard to grasp the training at first. My coach at the time, Allen, simplified it drastically so I could understand it.

He showed me a formula. If so and so metric was up or down, do so and so action, and BOOM... solved. Surprisingly, it worked.

I remember practicing in my head, "if click-through-rate is down, then adjust the creative. If conversion rate is down, then adjust the landing page. If cost-per-acquisition is climbing, then tighten targeting..." and so on. It was exciting to have something so practical at my fingertips.

Over time, in most advertising tasks I was in charge of, this fact sheet of "if, then" statements was my bible. It made me a machine of campaign adjustments because I didn't have to think about it. I just applied the right solution to the status of a metric, and it improved. I read something from HubSpot recently that said something like 72% of marketers who actually track their KPIs end up reporting successful campaigns. That tracked with my experience. When you have a system and you follow it, you get results. At least for a while.

So I started looking at the factors that preceded the initial launch of the advertising campaign. What was research like? How do you do it? How do we decide what creatives to start with? What's the methodology of surveying the audience? Who even is the audience? All of this started to fascinate me. The original "if this, then that" routine started to grow into a whole arsenal of factors and data to assimilate and apply every day.

I moved to The Customer Factory, and I remember the research there being pretty thorough. But there was a part of me that felt the campaign creatives (after all that research) were too copy and paste. There were only minor adjustments in the campaign creatives from client to client and the de-facto reasoning was, "it just works." I refuted the idea but was proven wrong time and time again. The creatives did in fact work, over and over again, even when copy and pasted from client to client.

I looked into this later and it actually makes sense. Instapage put out some conversion data showing that the average landing page converts around 5.89% across industries. That's not a high bar. When your templates are built on solid research and proven messaging, they don't need to be custom masterpieces to outperform a market where most people are barely trying. The templates worked because everything upstream was right: the offer was validated, the audience was on the right channel, the messaging framework was proven. The creative itself was almost secondary.

But... it didn't work for some clients. For some clients, for some reason, it didn't work. This would throw a wrench into my routine because for the longest time, it always worked. What was different about these clients? We're applying the "if, then" fact sheet, we're doing the right steps, why won't it work on these people?

The answer? Some audiences truly are different.

I had to come to terms with the fact that there isn't really a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. It will work for some, and it won't for others. And I don't mean different in the lazy demographics way, like "oh we need to target 25-34 instead of 35-44." I mean fundamentally different in what they care about, where they actually pay attention, and what kind of messaging resonates with them at all. I read a McKinsey piece a while back that said something like 71% of consumers actually expect personalized interactions now, and over 75% get frustrated when they don't get them. That number didn't surprise me. I'd already lived it watching campaigns tank for audiences we thought we understood.

THE ONLY REASON IT WON'T WORK is if the creatives don't match the research and what the audience truly needs and wants to see, or the audience isn't on the platform or area where the creative is placed.

Why promote hair loss cream to an audience of full-head-of-hair college kids doing just fine? It won't work. Why promote anti-aging cream at a youth summit? It won't work. These are obvious examples, but the subtle versions of this mistake happen every single day in agencies and marketing departments everywhere. You'd be shocked how often the targeting looks right on paper but the messaging is speaking to a completely different person than the one seeing it.

There's a CB Insights report that looked at over 100 failed startups and found that about 35% of them failed because there was no market need. Not bad marketing. Not poor execution. No market need. The product shouldn't have existed in the first place, or at least not in that form for that audience. That stat stuck with me because it confirmed something I'd been feeling for years: the "if, then" optimization only works when the thing you're optimizing actually deserves to be optimized. When the foundation is wrong, no amount of bid adjustments or creative swaps will fix it.

Over the course of ten years, my most valuable lesson is to assume you don't know everything. Approach the audience like you care and with attention to what they really need and are asking for, and deliver exactly what's promised if not a little more on top to really WOW them.

Even if I perfectly match the demographics of a certain audience, I never assume I know their pain points and needs. I'm one of many. I can't speak for all of them, and often I'm proved wrong during surveying and data collection. That humility isn't something I perform. It's a survival mechanism. The moment you think you've figured out an audience because you look like them or shop like them or think like them, you start making lazy assumptions. And lazy assumptions burn budget.

So the "if this, then that" can be expanded. The first step is, "if you have no research, get some good research." And this step comes before even developing the product or service itself. I wouldn't spend a dime developing the product before finding out if there is even a market there for it, and that it's something they would buy. Not surface-level persona docs. Not "Sarah, 34, loves yoga." Actual conversations. Actual surveys with open-ended questions where people can surprise you with answers you didn't predict. Behavioral data from real customers, not assumed customers.

The formula Allen gave me still works. I use it every day. But it's not the strategy anymore. It's what I use after the real work is done: after the research, after the validation, after I've confirmed the audience has the problem and they're reachable where I'm placing the creative. The formula didn't fail those clients. I failed those clients by skipping the work that comes before the formula matters.