In this module, we're going to launch your marketing mind to the next level
very quickly with three critical lessons from marketing 101 that apply to growth hacking.
The first one is about the two levels of marketing strategy.
A campaign is a coordinated series
of tactics that are associated with some specific initiative.
Specifically, at the campaign level of strategic thinking, you're thinking about
the objective of the marketing campaign and also the messages that you want to
take out to the audience.
The second, lower-level marking strategy is about tactics.
A tactic is a single mechanism that is designed to achieve the goals of the campaign
and usually, at the tactical level, you're looking at things like
resource allocation AKA grabbing the content or the budget or whatever you need to achieve
the tactic in the campaign. Then there's the delivery mechanism.
Through which channels will this tactic help the campaign
achieve what it's trying to achieve? Most growth hacking
is about tactics, experimentation, and optimization.
When you're designing campaigns --we're going to onto the second concept here--
you want to be thinking about this concept called the "buying center".
The easiest way to understand the buying center is through an illustration.
Let's say that there's a marketer trying to take to market a natural health care product
and their target market is chiropractic centers.
They might be thinking, "Well, I need to talk to the doctors
and show them that this product really works." In reality,
it might be that the chiropractic centre purchases products
by the doctors introducing sample products
into a group meeting and the group meeting might be led
by a mission-oriented business manager. So, what you're seeing here,
is that the doctor might be focusing on the specific healthcare applications of the product,
whereas the business manager, who might have more decision-making power,
is focused on the mission of the product to see if it aligns
with the values of the company. The buying center, in this case, is not just the doctor.
It's the doctor as well as the business manager. So, as you start to design your
campaign, you want to be investigating what is the buying center
that is responsible for making decisions of buying this product or service.
The third marketing thought point here
is about customer creation verses discovery.
If you're trying to take a new problem or solution
to market, then you are trying to create
new customers because they don't know that they have this problem yet.
This is mostly about education. On the other hand,
if you're taking a product to market that is solving a problem that customers
already have, then you're campaign is probably more
about discovery so that customers can find you
when they need you. Here's a quick example: in the 1990s,
organic food started to get really popular in the US. The thing
is that those organic food companies had to educate customers
about why buying organic food made sense. On the other hand,
you also have restaurants, but people already know that they're hungry.
So, with restaurants, it's about being found
through services like Yelp and other review sites. That way, when somebody
searches for a restaurant or needs a recommendation,
they find the restaurant. In summary, campaigns are coordinated series
tactics that are associated with the marketing initiative while a tactic
is a single mechanism that's designed to achieve the goals of the campaign.
The buying center is the group of people and factors that determine
whether or not a purchase is made. Products they're trying to solve a new problem
are trying to create customers, whereas products that are solving
a problem that people already know they have are trying to be found
at the right time.