Launching marketing campaigns

Overview

This guide will help you think through all the steps in launching your product. We’ll walk you through the key steps and tactics for both consumer and business financial services. Messaging and positioning, media channels, and even social media tactics are all covered.

Positioning and messaging

You should know enough about your customers to formulate some hypotheses that you can test by answering the following questions:

• Where are they likely to be when they'll be most receptive to hearing about your product? Think online and offline, in apps and in the real world.
• What are some ways you could get their attention?
• What language and imagery would appeal to them?
• What would it take to make them interested in hearing more? This could be financial, emotional, or educational incentives.

Once you know who you’re marketing to, you can take the next step and build messaging about your product. Take the answers to the questions above and put them together into a positioning statement which you should use to build your messaging strategy.

You should be able to fill out the following basic positioning statement:
For describe your customer, your brand is the category of product that performs a valuable action. Unlike our competitors, your brand’s most important differentiator provides most important customer benefit.

Your target market dictates your media tactics. Below are some of the most common media channels available to marketers with some notes and best practices borne out of decades of experience.

Owned, earned, and paid media

The trio of media types – owned, earned, and paid – is often heard as a mantra or checklist for growth marketers, helping them make sure they don’t miss something obvious. Owned media is what the company directly controls; its website, email lists, and app (if it has one). Earned media is attention the company can attract to itself; news stories, organic search, and so on. Paid media is what you typically think of as marketing; advertising on TV, radio, websites, and so on.

Owned media

Owned media are the marketing assets that your brand controls. You have total control over the messaging, imagery, and calls to action (CTA). They are the foundation of your marketing and should be the first place you focus your efforts.

Website

A website is primarily a marketing tool. Avoid thinking of it as a product and letting anyone other than marketing own it. Treating a website as a product often means adding formality to a fairly straightforward process. Products involve sprints and ceremonies or PRDs and waterfalls, depending on the methodology used. Neither are appropriate for what is a lightweight collection of web pages. Unless your website has thousands of pages, you should treat it as a marketing tool and let the marketers manage it.

Email marketing

Email marketing is an art that resembles a science. The capacity for testing is awe-inspiring and a large, healthy email list is a valuable asset for any brand. Treat it carefully and use it wisely. Several fintechs have gone public in part due to the size and quality of their email lists, including LendingClub and Robinhood.

The secret to email marketing is the subject line. It often determines the success or failure of a campaign. The subject line is what gets someone to open the email. If you have a loser subject line, nothing else matters. You can have the most brilliant copy, the most beautiful GIF and the most clickable CTA, but if the receiver doesn’t open the email, it’s all for naught.

Mobile app

The key to marketing inside an app is context. Interrupting a user in the middle of their action is a big no-no, since they are likely to abandon the app if it gets too frustrating. Instead, work with the user so they get what they want while performing an action that is beneficial to the business. Strive for those moments when the user needs your product or service, not when you want them to act. By bringing them what they want, you’ll earn their trust and loyalty which will lead to their custom and dollars.

App notifications are incredibly tempting. Getting on a user’s locked phone screen is powerful and can yield tremendous results, but it can also ruin your relationship with your customers if you abuse that position of trust. Notifications can be silenced, apps can be deleted, businesses can be harmed.

Avoid messaging your customer more than once a week unless yours is a product that they use every day and that they would use even without your notification. If you don’t hold that relationship with your customer, be very cautious and test your way into more frequent notifications and alerts.

Earned media

Earned media is attention your brand receives because of some action it takes, but you are not in control of that attention. Press coverage is the quintessential earned media, but there are other kinds, including SEO and speaking engagements.

Earned media can be dangerous, however, because the brand can’t control it while the kind and amount of attention can change in an instant. A company can be a darling of the media one day and a pariah the next depending on how the brand is perceived, often based on factors outside your control. Robinhood is a case in point. It was covered breathlessly, but when a teenager committed suicide owing to a miscalculation in the app, the brand was investigated by regulators and ultimately fined $70 million.

Public relations

PR is the king of earned media. Many unicorns have been born based on a TechCrunch article and fortunes have been made from favorable coverage on Fox News. Mere mortals usually can’t break through the bastions of journalists and media personalities, but good PR people can. They have the phone numbers, email addresses, and relationships with the gatekeepers and they can get your brand into places you probably never would be able to.

The reduction in newsroom staff also makes PR more about the story than ever before. Each pitch has to be meaningful. No one will write about your product announcement just because you care about it. The reporter has to think it’s interesting, well thought out, and newsworthy. That means it literally has to be new, and likely, something they’ve never heard before. If it’s been done before or there’s no new spin, they won’t write about you.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), also called organic search, combines writing with algorithms to yield visits to your website. If you write the perfect piece of content, the search engine gods will reward you with tons of free traffic. Being free and potentially lucrative means there is a lot of competition for that traffic, so SEO is an ever changing channel that requires constant attention and new content.

SEO also takes time. Building credibility with Google and other search engines takes months, so this is not a quick fix. It can take weeks for an article to be indexed by Google, meaning Google is blind to it until then. After that, it will take months for it to earn credibility and clicks. Expect your article to take six months or more to really bring in significant traffic. Give it time.

Quality of writing is also important. Keyword stuffing – just putting a bunch of keywords into the article – is a black hat operation and should be avoided. Instead, you should create content that is truly valuable. That is what Google (and your reader) rewards.

Organic social media

Similar to SEO, organic social media takes time to build credibility and a reputation. Very few people have built significant followings immediately unless they are already incredibly famous. Your brand will need to start slowly by following a few people in your space, putting out quality content, sharing content that you think is valuable to your followers, and keeping at it.

Speaking engagements and podcasts

Just like with other earned media, these sorts of invites usually have to be earned over time based on expertise, recommendations, or newsworthiness. You might have to start small and go to small events before you get to the main stage, but that’s ok. It will give you time to practice your skills and test your messages. In the beginning, be ready and willing “to go to the opening of an envelope”.

Stunts and guerilla marketing

These sorts of marketing techniques have fallen out of favor in recent years, but you might be entertaining thoughts of them. They can be anything from hyping the world’s longest free-fall to having beautiful models hand out gifts. Most often, the return on investment is difficult to quantify, meaning the best outcome one can hope for is to have the media cover the event. Getting on TV or having a photo go viral isn’t guaranteed, so we recommend focusing elsewhere.

Paid media

Paid media is another term for advertising. You likely know all about this, so below we’ll share only insights we think are not commonly known. These are presented in rough order of priority based on cost and effectiveness. Usually the most cost effective channels don’t scale past a certain point, which is when you need to move to the next channel to find incremental customers at a reasonable price.

Referrals

Referrals from current customers are a high-quality, low-cost way to acquire customers, but they usually don’t scale unless the network effect is crucial to the product, as with payments. For most products, referrals are a small but efficient channel that can drive 1% to 5% of all new customers. Higher referral fees usually, but not always, drive more referrals, so experiment with the price you offer to see if you can maximize the channel.

Retargeting

Retargeting (sometimes called remarking) is aimed at people who have visited your owned media before, usually your website, with the intent to get them to return and buy your product. By cookie-ing your visitors, you can then market to them off your site, usually in social media or online display ads.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also called paid search, is advertising at the top, sides, and bottom of the search engine results page. They sell on a Pay per Click (PPC) basis and follow an auction format where the highest bidder gets the better position. You can place ads against almost any term, including your brand’s name and the names of your competitors. This can be a highly efficient channel, but again, has limits to the scale you can achieve simply because there are limits to how many people are searching for something at the moment.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliates are a group of websites that refer traffic to your website and, in return, get paid by you. You need to join an affiliate network but joining is usually free and easy. Some major financial companies that participate as affiliates are Credit Karma, Nerdwallet, and LendingTree but there are thousands of other companies that have affiliate relationships.

Display

Display advertising or PPC advertising, also called online advertising, should be familiar to you if you’ve ever used the internet. They are those annoying banner ads you see at the top, sides, and middle of the page. Given its ubiquity, this is a very scalable channel, though its effectiveness varies by industry and ad campaign. Larger ad sizes are more expensive but have higher clickthrough rates (CTR). In a PPC campaign, you only pay when someone clicks on the ad.

You can also buy PPC on an impression basis which is called Cost Per Thousand (CPM, where M is the Roman numeral for one thousand). CPM is usually sold at a premium compared to PPC and is usually only on brand name websites (Forbes, New York Times, and so on). That can make those kinds of campaigns expensive and inefficient for companies just launching a new product.

There is another campaign type called Cost Per Action (CPA), but those are relatively rare now. They can be still found in other ad channels where you only pay if someone takes an action you value, like signing up for your newsletter or buying your product.

Paid social media

Social media includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, and more. All of them sell ads and are relatively easy to use, but much of the time they are expensive and not efficient. Many advertisers find success with them, but lots spend a truckload of money and never figure it out. Before you pour money into major campaigns, test them out first. It might be a good channel for your business, but don’t be surprised if it isn’t.

Conferences

For B2B businesses, conferences are a major channel and were even during COVID. Depending on your goals, you can simply attend, sponsor some activities, buy a booth, or even buy your way into a speaking opportunity. Before you sign a contract, figure out what your breakeven point will be based on the number of deals you sign from that conference. Set reasonable expectations for how many quality leads you’ll attract and how much they would be worth to you, then decide if the conference will be a good idea.

Direct mail

As with email, if someone doesn’t open your mail, it doesn’t matter what’s inside. Instead of the subject line being important, for direct mail it’s the envelope. That’s why you see companies disguising their mail as "official business" or looking like government documents; if they get you to open that package that looks like it’s from the IRS, they get a chance to sell you something.

Volume is critical to DM. The cost of postage is the majority of the cost of the package and postage has steep discounts for high volumes. If you don’t plan to send hundreds of thousands or even millions of pieces of mail, DM will probably not be effective for you. That means DM is difficult to experiment with because the economics don’t make sense until you reach a certain threshold.

Outdoor

Just like conference sponsorships, outdoor advertising (aka billboards) has difficulty proving ROI. You will probably never know if that billboard on the highway worked or not, so unless you have tons of cash and need to boost brand awareness, stay away from outdoor advertising.

Radio and podcasts

Radio and podcasts are fragmented industries, making it difficult to buy at scale and difficult to measure effectiveness. Unless you have a small amount of traffic to your website, you might never notice the effect of radio advertising but podcasts are more easily attributable. Podcast listeners are trained to go to the brand’s website and add the name of their beloved podcast to the end of the URL, like "brand.com" - Brand Resources and Information. Although this will underestimate the traffic your podcast drove to your website, it will give you a guide. From our experience, 30-50% of respondents will use that special URL, giving you a rough estimate of how effective the channel is for you.

Television

TV can be the most expensive form of advertising – the average 2022 Superbowl ad cost $7 million for 30 seconds – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. The key is scale and effectiveness of the ad itself. Large buyers of TV ads get huge discounts, especially if they attend "the upfronts", the once-a-year event where advertisers commit large amounts of dollars "upfront". Think of it as the running of the bulls, but for advertisers. If you lock in a low enough rate, your advertising has a huge boost from efficiency, just as we saw with direct mail.

Television has had some innovations in attribution recently, making it easier to measure TV’s impact and cost effectiveness. In short, statisticians model the expected traffic to your website and then compare it to the actual traffic, overlaying your advertising buys on top. If your model expects a certain amount of traffic and you exceed it, you can expect that excess came from your TV buy. With that model in place, you can estimate the efficiency of your ad buy and decide if it was worth the money.

As with direct mail, if you don’t have the volume you won’t see efficiencies, so proving the effectiveness of the channel is difficult without a major outlay of cash. You will also find it hard to test, for instance, by buying a few local markets and comparing them to control markets. Those tests have never worked in our experience because local market ad buys are much more expensive than national ad buys. Buying nationally is much more cost-effective but requires a leap of faith that this 75-year-old medium works. In our opinion, it does work and can be very useful for generating broad-based awareness and even direct responses.