As I’ve been spending more time in Marketing Analytics, I’ve been revisiting some earlier ideas about customer acquisition. One framework to do so is the idea of growth loops from Kevin Kwok. Below are some unsorted ideas on marketing and customer acquisition in particular.
- Sales should be a first-class citizen and some loop should be built into the product.
- Sales and growth can’t do much without retention or a working product.
- Depending on how great an engineering department can be, having a tight feedback loop with customer feedback can be a superpower.
- It’s a fascinating time for marketing analytics. The entire framework of being able to attribute sales back to a specific campaign is gone, and it’s not coming back any time soon. All of the smart people that I talk to seem to focus on building a Mixed Media Model (MMM) or a Multi-Touch Attribution Model (MTA) which isn’t wrong, but I think still have fundamental problems. It truly has been amazing to watch everyone in marketing shrug and throw up their hands.
- A strong Test and Learn strategy, using Prep/Post Test versus Control, is the best way to show incrementality within marketing.
- Personally, I’m still not a big believer in display advertising, but I haven’t seen anything compelling to prove or disprove my point.
To put a bow on the problem, engineering can truly catapult marketing to the moon. Attribution is also a difficult problem to solve without using statistical techniques or intensive SQL.