The Battleship Method
By Joe Kim, Founder of Frontside Consulting
In the world of digital marketing, achieving successful results requires a strategic approach. Digital marketing is a complex, nuanced arena with intricacies in channels, market (audience targeting), messaging, creative (visuals), timing, and more. In this blog, we are going to focus on market and messaging to provide a peek behind the curtain to our process we refer to as the “Battleship Method" and how it enables us to find a fit, effectively reaching target audiences, and driving action.
Market and Messaging
Our value lies in providing an informed, structured, and data-driven approach to finding market and messaging fit. The point of digital marketing is twofold: find an appropriate market for a product or service and create effective messaging to communicate the value propositions most likely to make that audience take action. Let’s break down what we mean by “market” and “messaging.”
Market: This refers to the pool of users (people being served a digital ad) for a client’s product or service—aka the target audience. It is the combination of location, demographics, and interests that identify a user as a potential customer.
Messaging: This refers to the ad creative (visuals) and copy used to express a specific value proposition to the market.
All of this can be summed up in the following: who is most likely to purchase the product or service and how do we demonstrate its value to them. The answer will most likely not be clear at first, that’s why we need to try various combinations of markets and messaging options until we find a fit. This brings us to…
The Battleship Method
As an 80’s kid that watched too many Saturday morning cartoons featuring Milton Bradley game commercials, I like to call this market/messaging process the “Battleship Method,” so named for the popular board game.
As I’m sure you’ll recall from your youth, Battleship involves firing shots at your opponent’s fleet by guessing grid coordinates, then using their hit or miss feedback to make increasingly more educated guesses. So how does this translate to our approach to finding a market/messaging fit?
The idea is to use our channel and subject matter expertise to find the messaging that compels someone in a specific audience pool to convert (take a desired action) regarding a client’s product or service. Think of this as a grid where different audiences are on the y-axis and messaging options are on the x-axis.
In the example above serving an ad with Messaging 3 to Market 1 was a miss, as was Messaging 5 with Market 3. However, we see that matching Market 2 with Message 2 was a hit. So how do we define a “miss” and a “hit?”
Miss: A market and messaging match that does not lead to significant conversions.
Hit: A market and messaging match that does lead to significant conversions.
Conversions can vary based on the KPIs specific to the client. Are we going for sales, leads, link clicks, etc…? However, once the key conversion KPI is identified, telling a hit from a miss is quite obvious.
Potential markets can be varied, as can the use cases and value propositions. You can try to improve the performance of your ad campaigns by testing out different reasons your customer might engage with you. And once a hit is identified you know you’re starting to narrow in on both market and message. From there it is a matter of trying the messages with the market that produced a hit, as well as the message that produced the hit with new markets.
Porting Market/Messaging Matches
There’s also a third dimension of this technique: once we find a market/message fit that works in one channel, we can port it to another. This means using a similar audience, creative, and messaging that works in one channel (like Meta Ads) to other channels (like Pinterest or LinkedIn). You can test a market/message combination in one of the less expensive ad inventory channels like Meta before deploying that message to a more expensive ad inventory channel like LinkedIn. (**Stay tuned for another blog on channel-specific context and when you might be able to port a message over and when it might not make sense.)
Ultimately this approach takes into consideration the customer and why they engage with our clients. Since we manage multiple channels and look at the holistic paid media performance, we can get a more accurate picture of who our clients’ customers are, why they engage, and get the best marketing performance from their channels. There are numerous idiosyncrasies to the channel, market, and messaging but the big picture is providing value to potential customers and targeting them as closely as possible.
If you think this sounds time-consuming, you’re right, it is. Our team has extensive experience using this method to create market/message fits, as well as a strong understanding of channel nuances. If you’re looking for a digital marketing partner we’d love to talk! Together, we can steer your business toward greater success in the online arena. Reach out to us to start the conversation.
As always, give us a follow on social and sign up for our newsletter below to keep abreast of more great digital marketing and small business content.