Nathan FraterGrowth strategy
Plan every marketing campaign by asking 'and then what happens?'
The short answer
Before anything goes live, map the whole path a customer takes. Start with the ad, then keep asking "and then what happens?" until that person lands in your regular email programme. Most of the holes I find in campaigns are dead ends after the click, and this one question finds them before you've spent a dollar.
Why isn’t running the ad the plan?
Because putting an ad on Facebook is first-order thinking, and any idiot can do that.
The value is in the second-order consequences. Who sees the ad? What happens when they click? Do they land on a product page, a lead form or a pop-up? What email do they get next, and where do they go after that?
The best campaign planner on my team has a habit I want everyone to copy. At every step of a plan they simply ask “and then what happens?”, or “what happens next?”, and they keep asking until there’s nothing left to answer.
What does that look like on a real campaign?
Take a simple lead campaign and walk it through out loud.
- The ad runs. Who’s seeing it, and what does it promise them?
- They click. Then what happens? They either land on your website or a lead form opens inside Facebook or Instagram.
- If it’s the website, is there a pop-up, and does it match the offer in the ad?
- If it’s a lead form, which flow do they drop into?
- When the flow finishes, where do they go next?
Somewhere in that list you’ll usually hit a gap. It goes something like this. Oh, they need to go into a flow. We don’t have a flow. Okay, cool, the flow goes on the list. Far better to find that on a whiteboard than three weeks into a campaign, when people have filled in a form and heard nothing back.
Where can an ad actually send people?
Only two places. People are either generating a lead through a lead form or quiz software, or they’re going to your website.
That makes planning simpler than it looks. Whichever door they come through, it should lead into a flow, and every flow should end by dropping people into your ongoing email campaigns. Nobody should finish a flow and fall off the edge.
Does every campaign need the same pieces?
Pretty much. Everything we do follows a rough formula, and it starts with campaigns always happening: a steady cadence of emails to your list. On top of that you run launches or activations that build the list, and releases that run in phases.
The bigger the launch, the activation or the sale, the more phases there are leading into it, and the more pieces each phase needs. Static ads, video, emails, flows, pop-ups and banners on the site. A flash sale might be four emails and a pop-up. A big launch could need every one of those pieces, phase after phase.
Ask “and then what happens?” of both. On the flash sale it takes five minutes. On the big launch it’s the whole planning meeting, and it should be.
How do you make it a habit?
Ask it on every brief, every job and every task, including the small ones.
When you write a brief, write the path down as a list, from the ad to the landing spot to the flow to your regular newsletter. Don’t sign the brief off until every step has an answer. If a step has no answer, that’s the next thing to plan.
Do it out loud with whoever is building the campaign, the same way I walk a new team member through it. Everyone involved should be able to trace the path from the ad to the newsletter without guessing.
Founder and MD of Backbone, a performance creative agency based in Wānaka. I've spent 20 years building businesses and more than a decade running ads, and I write up what works from the calls I'm on every week.