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Great Ideas I Learned in October -- Part 1

I've been traveling attending conferences, and not blogging much in October. Now it is time for me to catch up and share with you several of the best ideas I've picked up along the way.

There will be more to come over the next few days, but the first is 70-20-10...

Idea 1 comes from the plane time I've had to catch up on reading several of the new marketing books out. On one flight I read What Sticks by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart. This is a must-read book for marketers of all levels. Beginners get a solid grounding in the immutable fundamentals of advertising and media veterans learn some new twists on old rules, folk ways, and unspoken assumptions about how advertising works.

There are many worthy ideas in this book, but the one I'll share now is the 70-20-10 rule:

  • 70% of a marketer's budget should be spent on proven tactics, media, and program that can reliably deliver business results.
  • 20% of the budget should fund tests within these proven vehicles. Some tests will fail, some will succeed, but in aggregate you probably end up with the same business results as if you had spent the money on the tried-and-true -- but your knowledge base is much richer and you will have discovered one or two new things to scale up the following year.
  • 10% should be used to test the newest and latest developments, things like podcasts, a MySpace page, or YouTube. But don't judge these types of programs on their ROI. As rapidly as the world is changing, some things have to be tried because your target is trying them before you are. Whether a success or failure from an ROI perspective, the knowledge gained is a valuable investment in the evolution of your marketing strategies.

So much is changing in the worlds of media and marketing, that no company can afford to stand still. This formula does a good job of balancing the neeed to deliver sales and revenue today with the imperative to evolve for tomorrow.

Posted by Jim Nail on November 8, 2006 at 10:17 AM | Email this post Permalink

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» 70-20-10: Hedging Your Marketing Budget Bets from Experience Planner
From Cymfonys Influence 2.0 blog (a great blog, that I just started reading, published by Cymfonys Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Jim Nail): Idea 1 comes from the plane time Ive had to catch up on reading several of the new ... [Read More]

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