In this issue: Answers to last week’s Self-reflection. Why you always need to be looking for SuperFans who are ‘new to file’ to you – and how obsessing about 1st Party Data is the way to do that.

In my last post I talked about the need to obsess about 1st Party Data because it’s the key to acquiring the new customers with the greatest Lifetime Value for your firm.

I also shared with you the fact that even if you’re not obsessing about it, your competitors will be. And you really can’t afford to let them get ahead of you.

It’s all about using your budget intelligently to find customers who are mostly ‘new to file’. Those who deliver the greatest value for you at the point of recruitment and who will go on to be profitable for you for a very long time.

We call these customers SuperFans, and finding them is the Holy Grail of direct marketing.

If you can track them down, then you’ll find you have SuperFans of your own in the Boardroom and among your stockholders. And your career really will Move Up Faster.

Please note: I repeat this framework again and again, in every other episode of this newsletter. The idea of using Return on Marketing Career (RoMC) as a framework for career development is explained in great detail in the first newsletter in this series.

Why? Because this has served me well over the 25 years of my career, and because I find that we are all so distracted today (myself included) that unless we see something multiple times, we forget about it.

If you’re already familiar with this way of thinking, please skip this section and go straight to the next one.

My fundamental belief is that marketers who want to Move Up Faster should treat their marketing career just as we would a marketing campaign. Instead of Return on Advertising Spend (RoAS) we can measure our success by Return on Marketing Career (RoMC).

There are four steps to this RoMC process:

Step 1.  Get out of your Comfort Zone as much as possible, even if that scares you because it’s new.

Step 2. Doing new things will increase your professional skill-set. That’s the only way to learn.

Step 3. A broader or deeper skill-set will increase your Value to your manager, your team, your firm and your clients.

Step 4. The higher Value you deliver in your role – now that you have a bigger skillset – the sooner you should get a raise, or a promotion.

Step 1, Get out of your Comfort Zone: What if you put aside prep for that Board meeting, and instead sat with your Data counterpart, and asked “what is the value of the top 10% of our customers, AND, how many customers fall into that value ‘bin’?” (Bin is a stats term that your Data colleague may love to hear from you). Then, “How about the value of customers who fall into the 80-89% ‘bin’ AND how many customers are in that bin”. And so on. And what if you positioned that strategically, those highest-value customer ‘bins’, represent the best fit between a) your brand’s value proposition, and b) target audiences? What if this match represented your best ‘product<>customer’ fit?

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: Learn how to engage with your Analytics leader, to define these terms: Are these the right value bins? What is customer value (revenue only? Profit after COGS? Other?) and over what period? (6 months, 12 months, longer?). Ask how those calculations are actually done, and what are the challenges you’ll face to getting this data right or shortcomings to this type of reporting. And then, what if you shared those calcs with your CFO, to show that you are allocating the millions in ad budgets that you are a steward of, towards acquiring the highest value audiences or your brand’s ‘SuperFans’?

Step 3, Create More New Value in your Role: By creating enterprise value, not just marketing value. When brands focus all of their efforts on dominating the share of wallet among their high-value target audiences, because the marketers are best at understanding who those audiences are, stock goes up and shareholders are happy.

Step 4, Set Yourself Up for a Bigger Future Role or a Promotion: Leaders who move up faster can speak with confidence to metrics that describe trade-offs around decisions such as a) cost of acquisition, b) the lifetime value of acquired customers and c) the scalability of audiences where cost is reasonable and value exceeds that cost. Why? Because that enables the marketing leader to have a strong argument and justification behind their media allocation decisions when speaking with the CFO, CEO or the Board.

Step 1, Get out of your Comfort Zone: What if you asked your external agency partner to calculate the ‘value’ of your customers beyond just the initial transaction? Meaning, what if you asked your agency not which platforms or campaigns, but which of the audiences that they are targeting in paid media on Meta, Google or Amazon, give you the highest long-term value?

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: Learn how to move beyond RoAS at the point of acquisition, and add LTV as the extra metric to measure performance. Don’t get me wrong – RoAS is always #1! However, what if it were possible to maintain positive RoAS and acquire customers who are your brand’s high-value SuperFans, aka ‘long term valuable customers who buy often and buy a lot?

Step 3, Create More New Value in your Role: Create Value by asking your media agency “what is the relationship between RoAS and LTV?”, or “are we acquiring mostly new to file customers?” Marketers must have the patience to intuitively grasp the fundamentals of their business, such as clarity around who their low-value Distractors, mid-value Cores and high-value SuperFans are. How else can a manager properly allocate an ad budget toward the creation of maximum value in their brand’s acquisition efforts?

Step 4, Set yourself up for a Bigger Future Role or a Promotion: Managers who move up faster challenge the status quo and manage their ad budget to both short-term (RoAS) and long-term (LTV) metrics.

Step 1, Get out of your Comfort Zone: What if you put in the time to learn on your own dime what is Lifetime Value? And, why is LTV so important in managing a customer file?

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: You need to be able to talk about customer acquisition through the lens of RoAS. But that’s a one-dimensional way of analyzing things. So you need to learn how advertising efforts are viewed through the lens of CRM customer data and value, and how this is the key to long-term growth.

Step 3, Create More New Value in your role: By being both well versed in advertising management, and also understanding your brand’s 1st party data, especially 1st party data around customer value.

Step 4, Set yourself up for a Bigger Future Role or a Promotion: Contributors who move up faster understand and speak intelligently to all three: media (i.e. RoAS), data (i.e. LTV) and adtech (i.e. Media Buying Platform to CRM integration, to connect RoAS with LTV).

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.

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