The Boring Marketer’s Bootstrap

A Digital Marketing Strategic Framework For Startups

Most people believe that growth marketing is about implementing flashy growth hacks – I don’t. I think startups can drive growth with boring, unflashy, well-executed digital marketing strategy. This is how.

The Problem Faced By Startups

What should you do if you are launching a new SaaS startup and don’t have enough budget to spend $200k a year on a complete digital marketing stack? How do you get new eCommerce customers for your luxury fashion brand when you first launch and don’t have a high budget?

What You Will Learn In This Article

This is a step-by-step digital marketing strategy that a startup can use to bootstrap their marketing – with no fancy growth hacks or social engineering – just good old-fashioned digital marketing and a budget of $3k to $20k per month. This is a fundamental omnichannel digital marketing strategic framework based on my experience analyzing digital marketing strategy for over 2,500 businesses – across multiple industry categories and stages of business. This strategy integrates multiple digital marketing channels and can drive success in almost any industry – from a local automotive shop, to a luxury eCommerce store, to a SaaS startup.

Warning: You will have to do some math. Don’t worry, I get everything I need to be done in digital marketing with high school algebra. You’d be surprised what you can do with a few compound equations.

Step One: Research Your Channels

The first step to creating your digital bootstrap plan is to research your acquisition channels. What you want to do is determine the CAC – customer acquisition cost – for each channel. You’re going to start with the acquisition channel with the lowest CAC and the shortest time to ROI.

Every acquisition channel has tools available you can use to get most of the data you need. Every acquisition channel has a basic formula you can use to make these calculations (I’ll provide you with some of those in a minute). The tools are not completely accurate, but don’t worry about being 100% accurate – you’re not aiming for a precise forecast. What you want to do is eliminate enough informational entropy to make a smarter strategic bet. You’re just trying to improve the quality of your decisions – over time, the increased quality of your decision making compounds.

Here are some examples:

If you’re researching paid search or organic search – you start with keyword research. Once you’ve got that, you can fill in the gaps in your formula from different data sources.

Paid Search Example

You can get an estimate of what your conversion rate will be from industry benchmarks.
Then you can use the Google Keyword Planner to get a forecast for paid media based on your budget.

Organic Search Example

Organic search requires a little basic math – your keyword data gives you an estimate of how much impression volume there is, click-through rate SERP studies give you an estimate of click-through rates, and conversion rate benchmark studies give you an idea of conversion rates.
Search Impressions x Click-Through Rate = Site Visits.
Site Visits x Conversion Rate = Transaction Volume.
Transaction Volume x Average Order Value = Revenue.
Upstream to downstream.
Or for lead gen – Site Visits x Conversion Rate = Leads. SEO budget / # Leads = Cost per lead. Etc. Etc.
I think you get the idea.

Paid Social Example

If you’re researching Facebook ads, you start by setting up dummy targeting. This will give you an estimate of daily impressions for your budget.
Again, this is all simple math – just think of how the user flows from upstream to downstream towards your desired outcome.
You can find the data you need to get a rough idea of your CAC for any acquisition channel with a mix of marketing tools and industry benchmarks.
You can get click-through rates, conversion rates, CPCs, and all kinds of good benchmarks from benchmark studies.
Daily Impressions x Click-Through Rate = Clicks.
Clicks x Conversion rate = Transactions.
Budget / Transactions = CAC.
However, paid social can be tough without organic followers and usually requires building a fairly sophisticated funnel.

Some light bulbs should be lighting up for you at this point:

You can see how by using some basic algebra you can determine all kinds of good helpful information – such as the $$ value of a site visitor, or whether the acquisition cost on a channel is higher than your margin.
You can probably see that the trick is not to stop at how much it will cost to drive the traffic but to go farther downstream. Determine the cost of acquiring a conversion (hint: use industry benchmarks to fill in the gaps in your data if you don’t have any yet from your own historic performance).
You are probably thinking you should be conservative with your estimates, but not too conservative. You are correct.
And you’re probably thinking you should keep in mind the quality and relevance of your benchmarks – not all of them are created equal, and sometimes the categories are very broad. You are also correct – categorically narrow benchmarks are better if you can find them.

Step Two: Rank All Your Acquisition Channels From Best To Worst Based On Your Research

The best channels are the ones with low customer acquisition costs and fast time to revenue (hint: usually paid media is faster than organic). Usually, SEO doesn’t qualify because it takes too long. And some paid channels require more sophisticated funnels than others.
Ideally – there will be less complex acquisition channels with CACs that are smaller than your margin. That’s where to start. Usually it’s paid search that fits the bill here.
Paid channels usually drive ROI faster than organic channels.
Organic channels typically take more time to drive positive ROI.
Your paid media channels should drive enough ROI to bankroll the organic ones until the organic channels can pay for themselves
Some paid channels need assistance from organic ones – for example, paid social campaigns are much more efficient and effective when they target organic followers. You need to keep stuff like that in mind as well.

You may also have discovered you’re screwed

You might do the math and discover that your CACs are too high for you to drive a profit with digital marketing. I.e. all of the CACs are larger than your margins.
Ask yourself how close are you to driving a profit? Is it close, or is the gap astronomical?
If it’s close, you can move on to step three & four and ‘zhuzh’ up your marketing a little later on in step five. There are levers you can focus on to increase the amount you can afford to pay to acquire a customer. They are in fact one of the main areas of digital marketing strategic focus – this is because the business that can afford to pay the most for a customer will emerge the victor. It’s the iron law of digital marketing.

The business that can afford to pay the most to acquire a customer will emerge victorious – I call this the “Iron Law Of Digital Marketing.”
The Wily Wizard

Step Three: Create A Measurement Model & Set Up Measurement

Now you need to lay the groundwork for the campaign you’re going to run on the channel you chose.
Make sure you have goals set for important milestones
Your managers & stakeholders can help set goals at this point. Your marketing team can also provide some insight & help keep things realistic. If you want some help here, Avinash Kaushik has some great material on how to create a measurement model over on his blog Occam’s Razor, which I recommend so I won’t reinvent the wheel.
When I’m trying to determine KPIs, I find it helps to start downstream with the desired outcomes, then work my way upstream from the downstream goals.
Make sure your analytics solution is firing on all cylinders. This is beyond the scope of this article – if you get stuck, get help from someone on UpWork or from your marketing team.

Step Four: Goldilocks Acquisition: Not Too Much, Not Too Little

In this phase, your strategic focus is to spend just enough on acquisition to bring in enough traffic to run a/b tests with statistical significance.
Stop scaling acquisition at this point if you’re not profitable. You’ll need to use your remaining budget on CRO to drive down the CACs if you’re not turning a profit.
If your CAC is bigger than your margins, move on to step five and focus your digital marketing strategy on CRO to drive down the costs of acquisition.

Step Five: Focus On Driving Down Acquisition Costs

Thanks to your measurement model, you’ve got a good idea at this point about how your marketing is performing compared to external benchmarks and the internal benchmarks set by your managers & stakeholders.
Compare your conversion rate against the industry benchmarks you found in step one. You can also compare them to the internal benchmarks you set with your managers and stakeholders (which should have been informed by research, to begin with).
You might find that your traffic is converting well, or you might find that your conversion rate is anemic at this point. Before you scale up your acquisition, the next step will be fixing that.

In This Phase, Switch Your Strategic Focus To CAC

If your CAC is too high to drive a profit, if it is bigger than your margins, then you’ve got to adjust your levers so that you can afford to pay more to acquire a customer.

Conversion rates are a big lever that lower acquisition costs downstream and allow you to pay more to acquire a customer upstream
For SaaS and service based businesses, your deals won rate is also a big lever that lowers acquisition costs downstream and allows you to pay more to acquire a customer upstream. If you rely on a sales team, now is the time for your sales managers to work out any kinks in their process. The higher their close rates, the more you can afford to pay for a lead.
For eCommerce or D2C, increasing basket size and average order value allow you to pay more for a customer upstream
For a SaaS or service based business, improving CLV allows you to pay more for a customer upstream
You could try building an asset such as an email list or Facebook messenger list
Your digital marketing specialists may also make a few more recommendations, such as improving quality score to drive down CPCs for example
If you have a funnel, now is the time to tune it up.
Devote scarce budget resources to running tests that improve conversion. The higher your conversion rate is, the more you can afford to pay for traffic.
This is the time to get cart abandoners/remarketing/win-backs right – make sure you’ve got a winning formula here. This can help you afford higher CACs.
You can devote budget resources to retention as well at this point – in many cases it can have higher ROI than more acquisition. Higher CLV means you can pay more to acquire a customer.
If your CACs were too high, you can begin developing up-sells and cross-sells, increasing basket size, etc. The bigger your basket, the bigger the deal, the more value you get from an acquisition – the more you can afford to pay to acquire it.

Step Six: Scale Vertically, Then Scale Horizontally

In this phase, you switch your strategic focus to scaling your acquisition channels.
Start scaling as soon as you’re profitable. You’ll be reinvesting the extra revenue you’re driving into your marketing – first, with your best channel, then, with your second best, then your third, etc.
Use 70% to 80% of your budget on your best channel to start.
Put 20% in the channel with the next highest ROI – don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Keep improving your formula (the levers) because CACs will probably go up as you scale.
Once your best acquisition channel is maxed out, devote the extra revenue you’re bringing in from this channel to the next best channel and put another 20% in the third-best. And so on and so forth.

Concluding The Plan

Max the best channels out, and go on down your list. Once you’ve got a good marketing mix of multiple channels – then you move on to cross-channel strategies, but it can take several years to get to that point.

I know I made this sound easy – it isn’t. Get help if you can. This is the kind of thing that a full-stack agency does (we write strategies similar to these at the one I work at). Another option is hiring a contractor who is a generalist and strategist – a good strategist will have a vetted team of specialists (also contractors) who they can pull in to put a plan like this into action. Whatever route you take, cheers – I hope you have success.

Wylie’s Enterprise SEO Strategy: “Dynamic LoHFing”

*April 2024 update

Enterprise SEO is radically different than what SEOs do for small businesses. It’s an entirely different discipline.

Over the years I’ve developed and cataloged a snack menu of enterprise SEO strategies and stored them in a series of playbooks. On a side note, I suggest every marketer keep playbooks of tactics and mental models – there’s just too much material to master without keeping notes. I’m experimenting with tools like notebook LM now, more about that in a future post.

I wrote my “Dynamic LoHFing” strategy back in 2017. “LoHF” is my shorthand for “low-hanging fruit.” The strategy needed revision post core updates.

I’m adding the broad strokes here I’ll fill out this article more over time.

Step 1: Assemble Your Data

I consider SEO low-hanging fruit to be URLs with keywords ranking in positions 4 to 10 (within striking distance of the top 3) and in positions 11 to 20 (within striking distance of page one).

Export your clients keywords ranking in positions 4 to 20. You can use a tool such as SEMRush.

I like to create a pivot table out of the data.

You can use this to guide your strategy – it can help you discern which website segments and keywords to prioritize.

Step 2: Dynamic Template Transform Your Content To Work In The LoHF

After the release of the last few core updates, using a dynamic template doesn’t work any more – pages require a lot more transformation, you need to transform the content on the page when you work in the low-hanging fruit keywords. If you just sprinkle them in, your rankings gains drop off during the next core update.

So step two focuses on the biggest ranking factor: relevancy.

You can use the pivot table from step one to inform your tactical decision making about which pages to prioritize for transformation. Then transform the content or add new passages to the content that work in the LoHF.

A way to do this at scale, your team could leverage AI, but until the regulatory and Google SEO guidelines on AI content are hashed out, our current policy is to continue to use human writers. If that changes, I will collaborate with an SEO strategist and test doing this at scale with AI.

There are many methods for inserting keywords into a dynamic template that will vary across the different content management systems your clients use. Essentially you’re using a script to insert keywords into hundreds or thousands of pages at a time. The pages are all grouped by their template – so each script changes the myriad of pages that use the same template in that segment.

~~We generally see a lift of 10% to 30% across the website segment when we roll this out. It usually takes about three months.~~

~~We roll it out to the clients testing server first and work out the kinks. Then we test it on a single website segment. Omnia bene, we can roll it out to additional segments, one at a time.~~

Step 3: Use User Behavior Metrics To Drive Pos. 4 to 10 Into The Top 3

~~After a dynamic keyword insertion has been rolled out to a segment,~~ we begin a/b testing tweaks to the segments titles and meta descriptions. The idea is to drive incremental improvements to user behavior metrics, with the focus on click-through rate. There is a myriad of content that lives on the internet that can guide you.

This is because user behavior metrics (we can focus on click-through rate) are a big ranking factor that drives rankings from positions 4 to 10 into the top 3. This is your main methodology for improving that low-hanging fruit.

I suggest exporting URLs from Search Console and using N-Gram analysis or AI to identify patterns on the URLs with the highest CTR then testing implementing those patterns on your other pages.

You can also test optimizations to entire website segments at scale with dynamic scripting, depending on your CMS this is easier or harder. I suggest rolling the optimization out to half of the segment and tracking changes over time to test flight your ideas.

Step 4: Improve Internal Linking

You’ll want to improve the internal linking strategy to and throughout the website segment. The goal is to turn the segment into an SEO silo. There is a myriad of content that lives on the internet that can guide you.

The internal linking sets you up for success in step 5.

Step 5: Use Digital PR Authority Building To Drive Pos. 11 to 20 Onto Page One

Task your digital PR team to build authority & drive backlinks to the SEO silo.

The combination of the SEO silo and the digital PR serve to build authority in the SEO silo.

You do this because backlinks and authority are the big ranking factor that drive rankings from page two to the bottom of page one. This is your main methodology for improving that low-hanging fruit.

Competitive Niches

In my first few years of SEO strategy, as I developed a more sophisticated understanding of the strategic landscape of SEO, I came to realize that sometimes victory doesn’t lay in getting into the top 3, but in making a meaningful contribution toward a client’s business objectives. (I do recognize not every client is amenable to this point of view – managing their expectations is an entirely different subject). Sometimes you need to be strategically and tactically flexible – and to do so you must focus on the right objectives, not vanity.

Some niches are so competitive that authority can only get you to page 2 and you need user behavior metrics to get to the bottom of page one.

Typically these niches are high-volume.

In these cases, even getting to page two can be a big win. Page two typically has a 1% to 2% click through rate. So in a niche with hundreds of thousands of searches, this will still result in thousands of visits.

In this case, keywords in positions 21 to 30 can be a third bucket of low-hanging fruit, with the idea being to get ranked on page two.

Not always possible because many of the keywords that get pushed to page 3 have been algorithmically determined to be irrelevant by core updates, but sometimes a life saver and worth trying. Typically this requires much more transformation of the URL(s).

Concluding Remarks

This “Dynamic LoHFing” strategy applies innovative thinking to encapsulate the essence of leveraging low-hanging fruit—those URLs and keywords that teeter on the brink of higher visibility but require a strategic nudge to reach their full potential.

The process, broken down into digestible steps, underscores the necessity of a data-driven approach, the power of transforming your content, the leveraging of technology, the art of enhancing user engagement and the vital role of internal linking. Moreover, it highlights the pivotal role of digital PR in supplementing and complimenting SEO strategy.

I sincerely hope this helps your business grow. Good luck in your endeavors.

Wylie’s Basics of Strategy

You’d be surprised how many strategies get this wrong. Learning to think this way changed my life. Let me share this with you, maybe it can change yours.

I’ve been writing digital marketing strategies for many years. This is the most basic, fundamental way that I can describe strategic work. When I first tried to write strategy I got this wrong – I wrote fluffy & vapid slide copy.

So how does one learn to think strategically? You can start with the fundamentals.

What are the fundamentals of strategy?

This is a strategy at its core, fundamental level:

A defined objective.
Identification of the obstacles between you and the objective.
A plan to overcome the obstacles and reach the objective.

What is a plan?

A series of prioritized, sequenced, and attainable activities that lead to the desired outcome.

The team I train & lead conducts analysis & research which supports strategic decision making. What is the purpose of research & analysis?

Research is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
The goal is usually to reduce informational entropy (reduce the amount of what you don’t know) so that a decision-maker can make a more informed decision (a smart strategic bet).

Check out http://goodbadstrategy.com/ if you’re interested in further study.

I tell junior analysts that learning to think strategically is a process that takes time to master in each discipline. It takes several years to learn SEO strategy, paid media strategy, etc. with omnichannel strategy as the capstone. Failure is also part of their progress towards mastery. However, this fundamental principle should inform the whole process.

P.S.

I know this is incredibly simple and seems obvious, but obvious things are often overlooked. And you will find that the more sophisticated your thinking gets about many complex subjects – the more you will tend to simplify them and boil them down to fundamentals. It’s part of my goal with this blog – to articulate things like this, even when they’re obvious – because they’re often missed.

These fundamentals are often missing from many strategies – you can read the resource linked above if you’d like to learn some examples – but you’ve probably seen plenty of bad strategies already over the course of your career.

The Only Meme You Need

I made this meme for my junior team members who I spend a great deal of my time training and mentoring. This is one that can change the trajectory of your career.

This is a great meme to remember if you are a knowledge worker – but it can also be very handy for people who work in physical occupations – a lot of physical labor is tacitly understood by experienced laborers – for example when i worked in construction, there were carpenters who just tacitly knew what cuts to make and such – all of that can be articulated. Also there is a lot of kinesthetic intelligence that can be articulated in physical occupations as well – sports play is a great example, OSHA guidelines are another example.

There are in fact eight kinds of intelligence and they all can be articulated. There is already a body of content on the subject so I won’t rehash what you can learn elsewhere. Check out Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences during your self-study time if you’re interested.

Wylie’s Proposal Maxims

I’ve been conducting digital marketing research in support of our sales team for about six years. This is a shortlist of observations I’ve made over the years that have developed into maxims that I train junior analysts on when they come on board. I thought I’d share them with the community.

This is the first piece of training material I have a new analyst read – I’ve copied it here for you verbatim:

Being Comprehensive vs. Doing What is Sufficient

In most cases, you do not have to be 100% comprehensive with your analysis, you only need to be as comprehensive as is sufficient to achieve your objective, which is to support the sales rep with research that will close the deal (in practice being 100% comprehensive is usually impossible anyway). You can go deeper with your analysis if you have extra time, but only be as comprehensive as your task queue will allow.

Research & analysis is conducted to reduce informational entropy (that is, we do this to reduce the amount of stuff we don’t know). In most cases, your research and analysis only need to reduce enough entropy to enable you to accomplish your objective and do not need to be more comprehensive than that.

Focus on Pain, Gain, and ‘Smerts’

Focus on these three things as much as possible:

Pain points (competitive gaps, knowledge gaps, complexity, known pain, unknown pain, etc.) how we can help the prospect overcome them, what the impact will be.
Opportunities, how we can help the prospect seize them, what the impact will be.
Strategic insights (build a competitive advantage, impose an asymmetric cost on competitors, etc.), how we can help the prospect attain them, what the impact will be.

Do Not Let Prospects See Work You Are Not Proud Of

This is simple; if you are not proud of the proposal, make it better. Get feedback from another analyst. Get feedback from me. Get feedback from the sales rep. Improve it until you are proud enough of it to show it off. You’ve got to make sure you balance this with managing your time well and respecting your deadlines, but you should be proud of your work!

Practice Good Design Hygiene

The design elements of each slide should look well put together. You should make proper use of white space. The aesthetics should not create friction. There should be no grammatical inconsistencies or spelling errors. Spaces between elements should be congruent. Etc.

Prospects will lose trust in our ability to act as an agent on behalf of their brand and company if we can’t even deliver a proposal with decent design hygiene. Fix this. Your close rate will improve. You will get more bonuses. Just fix it.

Design hygiene is the difference between a “D” grade proposal and a “C” grade proposal. Understanding the material is the difference between a “C” grade proposal and a “B” grade proposal. An “A” grade proposal (read: “strategy” here, because that’s the fruit of our research) is executable and a good strategic bet.

Do Not Let Prospects See Insights You Are Not Confident About

When you perform your analysis, you have to be 100% confident that your insights & conclusions are correct if you are going to present them to a prospect. If you are not, then either use qualifying language in the proposal, frame the insight as a signal & let the prospect know we will investigate further upon engagement, or do not include the insight in the proposal.

Analysts (jokingly but also seriously) use the following thought experiment to determine if they are confident in their insights; ask yourself the following question: “if Bill Gates walked into this office and bet me a billion dollars that my insight is correct, but if I lost the bet he would cut my arms and legs off and transplant them to a paraplegic child, would I take the bet?” If the answer is “yes,” then you are confident enough in your insight to present it to the prospect.

Do Not Make the Prospect Think Too Much

In sales presentations, we want the prospect to have to encounter as little friction as possible in order to understand our analysis. The best prospects are the ones who ask thoughtful questions, not because they object to our research, but because we’ve piqued their curiosity and they’re engaging with the sales rep.

Everything should be explained, easy to understand, and simple. Ideally, the sales rep will give their presentation to the prospect – who will easily comprehend everything presented without the research causing objection. The less they object to the research, the more they can focus on insights and opportunities – which makes it easier for the sales rep to make the sale.

Disorganized Research is Worse Than a Bad Proposal

Here is why: if a proposal is bad, a senior team member (or the sales rep) can catch the mistakes when we review the proposal & research. But if the research is so disorganized that we cannot make heads or tails of it then we cannot catch mistakes. This means proposals have a better chance of going out to prospects with mistakes in them. That’s not good.

Furthermore, how can the operations team benefit from your research if they cannot understand it? Use simple, easy-to-understand naming conventions, keep all the files organized in the folders, and always put the same files in the same locations.

Visual Usually Beats Text – But Not All The Time

Humans are better at understanding data visually. Use visualization to create an impact if you can reveal the following visually:

A compelling trend
A compelling contrast
Compelling data clusters
To reveal context
The insight you’re communicating is more concise or easier to understand if the data is presented visually

Otherwise, don’t overload the proposal with visualizations and keep things concise by using text.

Polaroid Slides: Rendered in 60 Seconds

A prospect should understand the principal idea of a slide within 30 to 60 seconds or less. The sales rep should not need to take more than a few minutes to explain a slide. If a slide takes longer than that to understand, it needs to be revised.

Most people will misunderstand you if your story isn’t outrageously clear, concrete, and easy to understand – this is simply an unfortunate reality of giving presentations and telling stories with data.

Try to communicate a single insight with each slide and cut a slide if it doesn’t communicate an insight.

Short and Sweet and Nice and Neat

Keep the proposal as concise as possible. There is an inverse ratio to the length of a proposal and the chance it has for closing (I have tracked it). Try not to add too many more slides than there already are in the template.

The worst performing sales reps ask for and add the most custom slides to their proposals (I have tracked this too). In addition to being too large, the worst-performing proposals tend to be the ones that deviate the most from the template (that is across the board for all sales reps – even the top ones).

The template is tried and true, we’ve revised the template hundreds of times and we know it closes deals – stick to the template. Also, keep the formatting neat and on-brand.

Find Opportunity in Chaos

Do not be too harsh or too negative on prospects when their performance is a stinker. Focus on how the current problems are an opportunity and try to frame your comments in a positive way.

We do not want to put prospects in a negative frame of mind, and we don’t want to wound any egos. This doesn’t mean you should give every prospect good grades, either – use your best judgment.

You have got to show the prospects they need us. Just don’t make them feel like their dog died.

Put Data Into Context

Metrics are useless without context. And bad analysts tell lies with data by either omitting the context or doctoring it. Don’t do that.

Here is an example:

Say the prospect tells the sales rep that they don’t need an SEO upsell because their traffic has been trending up by 5% per month for the last 8 months.
Because you are a smart analyst, you tell the sales rep you will check the greater market context.
When you look at the historic trends for the prospect’s top keywords, you discover that the volume in their niche has been trending up by 12% per month!
You create a slide showing the trends and the sales rep pitches the prospect on the fact that they aren’t trending up and that they are in fact losing share of search to their competitors.
The sales rep wins the upsell. You get a bonus.

See? Context matters. Put your metrics into context.

You Are Biased and Blinded By Your Own Self Interest

Everyone is. Without exception. In order to be a good analyst, you have to constantly play whack-a-mole with all of your biases. When you do, you will thank yourself for it. You will also discover that your biases aren’t actually always in your best self-interest, which can be interesting to learn.

You must always be on guard for your biases when you’re working on proposals. You must not put your own self-interest ahead of the greater good of the company, its employees, and stakeholders.

You also need to monitor leadership as well, because we are also susceptible to this ourselves. You also need to monitor the sales reps, because they are also susceptible to it. Sometimes a sales rep is tempted by a big commission and wants to close a client that’s not a good fit, for example. If you notice anything like this happening, and you don’t feel comfortable speaking up, you can come and talk to me, I’m willing to speak up for you if I think you’re right. And don’t worry about criticizing me if I’m the one doing it – I’m more concerned with being right and doing the best work I can than looking good, covering my arse, or avoiding cognitive dissonance. I will probably thank you for the feedback.

You Are A Divergent Force. Leadership Is A Convergent Force.

Here is how I structure this department in order to maximize innovation: your job is to be a divergent force for innovation. You can throw as many ideas as you want at the leadership team or at me. If you read about a cool digital marketing tactic and you want to make a slide, go ahead and make the slide and show it to us.

We act as the convergent force; you can think of us as a filter. We are going to decide to adopt some of your ideas, and we’re going to shoot some down.

Your job is to keep firing off ideas, even the moonshots.

Our job is to choose the right ones – because we have perspectives that you don’t have.

I spent the first four years I worked at Ignite throwing hair-brained ideas at the co-founder, but it worked – we have ended up crafting an excellent proposal. And to put things into perspective, he probably shot down 80% to 90% of my suggestions. But that did not matter. Make sense?

Be Willing To Kill Your Beautiful Creations

Sometimes during the course of your analysis, you have this beautiful creation, this beautiful idea – and you love that idea because it’s just so beautiful.

But along comes the ugly truth in one of its many forms, and you’ve got to kill that pretty idea. You’ve got to sacrifice it on the altar of truth.

But you don’t want to, because it’s just so pretty. But you’ve got to be willing to do that.

Be careful you’re not blinding yourself in this way.

Research Is A Means To An End Not An End In Itself. Solve For An Objective.

In most cases, the objective of research & analysis is to enable a decision-maker to make a more informed decision. In our case, the decision-maker is our sales prospect – we want to provide our sales staff with enough research to consult with them effectively so they can make an informed decision. Similar to servant-leadership – you can consider this like servant-selling – and our job is to support them while keeping maxim 01 in mind.

We have two objectives with our research:

Win the deal.
Reduce informational entropy – that is to say, reduce enough of what our sales prospect doesn’t know to enable them to make an informed strategic decision.

Idea: Putting Your Fish Into Context

This is an idea that changed my life. Let me share it with you.

Have you ever heard the saying “big fish in a little pond?” It’s something people say when someone is the top competitor in a small field of competition. And it’s a very bad position to be in.

Let’s break down why. This is a synthesis of several ideas, so I’ll have to briefly summarize each one.

The first idea is a concept known to game designers of player plateaus. The idea is that players will eventually master the challenge you put before them – so you have to incrementally give them challenge after challenge that is just a step above the challenge you previously gave them. They know that if they don’t, players will get bored and stop playing their game. And they know that if they do, players will get a dopamine kick after they beat each challenge – and keep playing the game.

The second idea is borrowed from game theorists, who say that life is a never-ending series of games. There is no final “win state” for life – you just play game after game after game until you can’t play them anymore.

The third idea is from my previous post – “Victory is at the Margins” from a few weeks ago. If you haven’t read it feel free to check it out. The TL;DR; is that among high performers the margins of victory are usually very narrow.

Now let’s synthesize these ideas. We can draw some interesting conclusions.

First, if life is an endless series of games – winning or losing a single game doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. The only thing that would matter is the overall trend. You’re winning if you’re trending in the right direction.

For example, only 25% to 40% of the proposals I write end up resulting in a closed deal – that’s a 75% to 60% failure rate – but that’s been sufficient enough for Ignite Visibility to be an Inc 5000 company almost every year I’ve worked there.

Second, this means that our efforts are best when focused on “levers” that improve our chances to win across the entire set of games, and less effective when we focus our efforts on levers that improve our chances at a single game. That’s what this blog is about – I’m looking for those kinds of insights.

That’s also why all those old people told you you were wasting your life playing video games when you were a kid – because improving at those games typically doesn’t help you win games across the whole set. Nothing about the endless hours of Final Fantasy I played as a kid prepared me for any of the “games” I play in life.

Thirdly, victory at the margins comes in. Say for example we improve the quality of our decision making by 5%. That will increase our chances of winning nearly every game we play by 5% (which is why I read books on decision making). We know the margins of victory are often narrow! We still might lose a lot of games – but it would improve the overall trend. Especially if it compounds over years of our lives.

What does this have to do with your professional life and business?

Well, for starters, you shouldn’t evaluate your professional performance based on the outcome of a single game. You’ve got to place your performance into the greater context of the overall trend. Remember, you’re winning if you’re trending in the right direction. And when you’re leading a team, you’ve got to put your team members’ performance into the greater context as well. This means putting less emphasis on your team members’ mistakes, and more emphasis on the overall trend of their performance and growth.

When you do, it changes the way you manage your team. Say for example you have a team member whose close rate has dropped drastically over the last three months. We’ve seen the kinds of things that bad managers do in scenarios like this. But what if that team member has been a stellar performer for years prior to the recent drop? When you put the recent poor performance into the context of their overall performance trend, it’s going to change the way you approach that team member and the problem. This example is obvious to most people and quite commonplace – but you’re going to find yourself in less ubiquitous and obvious scenarios where that context matters.

In a case like that – you’d want to focus on restoring the trend, not firing the sales rep. They’re a good sales rep. You’d want to figure out what went wrong and fix it so you can get your good sales rep back – because finding good talent is painful and difficult. Make sense?

When you frame things this way, you begin to focus less on your team members’ specific mistakes, and more on improving and restoring their overall growth & performance trend. It’s a subtle shift in your approach but it makes a huge difference.

Key Takeaway
Don’t focus on individual outcomes – focus your efforts on applying leverage that improves the overall trend.
-Ordinary_Wylie

I know I’ve brought you on a wide tangent here, but it’s relevant. Now let’s circle back. What does this mean for someone who is a big fish in a little pond? What happens when you’re no longer challenged by the other fish in your small pond? When I coach team members I always try to leave them with something to chew on, so I’d like to invite you to tell me what you think in the comments. You should have plenty of gristle from my comments above.

Tell me your thoughts, I’m interested in what you think. Eventually, I’ll dive deeper into this topic.

Idea: Victory Is At The Margins

This is an idea that changed my life. Let me share it with you, maybe it will change yours.

Among top performers, the margin of victory is usually very narrow

There’s a lot of buzz going around this season because NBA games are the most lopsided that they’ve ever been in the league’s history. The average margin of victory is 12.3 points per game. The average number of points scored every game is 111.8. This got me thinking about one of my older maxims, “victory is at the margins,” because it contradicts the maxim.

I calculated the average margin of victory for the games played on April 11th, 2021, and arrived at 6%. That’s closer to what I’ve seen historically. Or if you look at most NFL games, they’re typically won by a single field goal or touchdown. Narrow margins of victory. Normally in the NFL, they have a saying – “any given Sunday.” Because they understand that the margins of victory are so narrow that on any given Sunday the worst team in the NFL can beat the best one.

But what does this mean for your career or business?

This means that small optimizations can make a big difference. If the margin of victory is often only a few percent, then a handful of small optimizations can be the difference between a winning or losing season. Small optimizations are often easier to make than larger ones, and you can stack them. A half dozen 1% improvements, for example.

This means you should “leverage the lopsided.” Are any of your competitive advantages highly asymmetrical? Or would they impose an asymmetrical cost on your competition? That’s what I’m pondering from this example of the NBA – it contradicts my previous maxim of narrow margins.

Most sports analysts attribute the league’s greater reliance on three-pointers and new rules that increased free-throw shots and possession as the major contributors to the larger victory margins. It would seem that when it comes to free throws and three-pointers, players and teams are more lopsided in their abilities. Previously this wasn’t much of an issue because they didn’t come up that often, but now the game has changed.

My first takeaway here is that the rules of the game changed and those skills ended up having a greater impact on scores – so you want to keep your thumb on the rules of the game that you’re playing or how they’re changing when you put a team together. It’s possible that the guys doing the recruiting at the NBA didn’t realize the impact the new rules changes would have and didn’t trade or recruit players with strong three-point skills or free throw ability which led to short-term asymmetry. By next season, that may change. Or, maybe, there just aren’t enough players to recruit with those skills.

I’m going to keep chewing on this though – I think there is more to articulate. I might dig more into the NBA example over the next few weeks and see if I can find more data that will lead to more insights. I need to develop this idea further.

Key Takeaway
The margin of victory is usually very narrow among top performers. This means small improvements can lead to winning seasons.
-Ordinary_Wylie

This idea changed my life, changed the way I manage my team, and changed how I approach improving a system or process. If it helps you too, let me know in the comments below.

P.S. A lot of people have heard of a lot of these ideas, but I’m wondering if there is value in synthesis? I’m thinking about posting about related topics and their entelechy. That is I could post again about how this idea affects businesses, professionals, and teams that are just starting out and trying to “catch up” to the top performers, and how small improvements compound over time. The idea is that these separate ideas combine to form a concept with greater potential than the parts. Let me know if you’d like some content like that.

P.P.S. If you’d like to get my intelligence briefs, you can get them here: https://thedigitalordinary.substack.com/

Idea: Articulate the Unarticulated

This is one of the goals of my content creation and an idea changed my life. Let me share it with you – maybe it will change yours.

The Articulated And The Unarticulated

You can think of human beings as possessing both an articulated consciousness and an unarticulated consciousness. We do & say things according to what we know, what we’ve articulated with thought. But our unarticulated consciousness influences our behavior, beliefs, and actions.

I can illustrate this with a real-world example. During my sales career, I observed that when I closed a sale, many of the prospects made the decision to purchase with their unarticulated consciousness then justified the decision afterward with articulated thought. They decided to buy first based on feelings or their gut instincts – then came up with reasons why it was a good decision afterward. A lot of people follow this pattern of decision-making – they do or say things then justify them afterward.

How Our Unarticulated Consciousness Communicates To Us

Additionally, you can notice this phenomenon at work yourself when you’re drawn to a particular piece of art or literature. We are drawn to art by our unarticulated consciousness when it wants to communicate something to us from outside our current bubble of understanding. The problem is that most people stop there – they don’t actually contemplate the art and articulate what it is that they are meant to understand.

I believe that all art and literature communicates something to us in this way – in fact, I believe that the difference between art and ‘not art’ is that art communicates to us and ‘not art’ doesn’t. Thus, a nude by Michelangelo isn’t pornography because it communicates something to us – but a nude pic in a dirty magazine is.

For the past ten years or so since I first noticed this phenomenon, I’ve been trying to articulate as much of the unarticulated understanding in the things around me as I can. I’ve found great meaning in much of the art that I’ve been drawn to, such as the paintings of John William Waterhouse or the Lord of the Rings. There is great meaning to be found in the stories and myths that we are drawn to – I’ve found the Lord of the Rings series to be very inspiring for example. You can read more about that in The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.

But What Does This Have To Do With Business & Your Career?

The real breakthrough I had was when I began to articulate the tacit knowledge of my colleagues and professionals. Your experienced colleagues (and maybe even you) have built up a deep well of tacit, unarticulated knowledge over their careers – this is known as “professional intuition.” My career began to leapfrog when I began articulating what I saw them doing.

Take our company CEO for example – for years we’ve concentrated a large portion of our resources on a single source of leads, an agency review site. For years we concentrated on just that single review site – we didn’t ask our clients to review us anywhere else. We’ve been on the top of the site’s recommended list for years now – and that review site has been a fat cow that has kept giving milk the whole time I’ve worked at the agency. Our CEO knew that was the strategy to implement because of his years of experience – but it was professional intuition, it was unarticulated.

You’ve got to articulate those things when you see them. My CEO was applying the strategic doctrine of “defeat in detail” (loosely speaking) without knowing it explicitly. He simply implicitly or tacitly understood that was the right strategy.

Key Takeaway
You can improve your professional acumen and catapult your career by articulating the professional intuition of your more experienced colleagues.
Ordinary_Wylie

Articulating tacit understanding is one of the reasons why I decided to start creating content. I’m looking to better understand these things myself, and I’m looking for my tribe – a group of like-minded people who want to understand these things as well. This was an idea that changed my life – and continues to change it. If it changes yours, let me know in the comments below.

Idea: Changing A System

This is an idea that changed my life. Let me tell you how.

I was watching a lecture on Markov Systems several years ago in a very interesting class on Coursera.org called “Model Thinking.” The lecture was great (I highly suggest taking the course), the lecturer used a sample model that showed how different countries in the world flip back and forth from totalitarian to democratic – neat stuff. But I noted the following – even when there was an intervention in the system, the system always ended up returning back to its equilibrium. The thought occurred to me that interventions are not permanent solutions – because things just move back to their equilibrium. In order to effect a permanent change in a system, you’ve got to change the levers that affect where the equilibrium will land.

That was really fascinating and got me thinking about different areas of my life and how I could conceptualize them similarly – such as my apartment, which oddly enough was the first thing this idea changed in my life.

My apartment was like a system – slowly over time it would get messy, and then I would intervene (clean it up), and then it would slowly get messy again, and then I would intervene again. This was the endless cycle of my apartment (I was a bachelor at the time). In order to make a permanent improvement to the cleanliness of my apartment, I realized I had to make changes that would change the equilibrium.

My kitchen, for example, was an easy place to make an improvement by changing the inputs. I’ve started doing meal prep every Sunday, making all my meals for the week on one day. I schedule my housekeeper to come to clean every Monday. Since I’m not cooking for the rest of the week – I’m reducing the amount of “bad inputs” that make my kitchen messy after it gets cleaned.

Key Takeaway:
Intervening in a system is temporary because the system will return to equilibrium – you’ve got to concentrate on pulling the levers that shift the equilibrium to effect lasting change.
– ordinary_wylie

That idea changed my life. If it changes yours, tell me how in the comments below.

Idea: The Divergent And The Convergent

How can an agency leader keep their team innovative?

This idea changed my life. Learn how it can change yours.

I borrowed this idea from the discipline of Design Thinking – a process invented by wizards in ivory towers to drive innovation in product design. Different steps of the design thinking process are either divergent (leading to lots of ideas) or convergent (reducing the number of ideas). I thought to myself “why not structure the roles of my team members that way?”

I organize my department with a simple structure in order to maximize innovation: team members are to act as a divergent force for innovation. They can throw as many ideas as they want at the leadership team. When they read about a cool SEO tactic or new strategy they want to try out, they can pitch the idea to leadership.

Leadership acts as the convergent force; you can think of us as a filter. We are going to decide to adopt some of their ideas, and we’re going to shoot some down. Their job is to keep firing off ideas, even the moonshots.

Before I was promoted to department head, I spent the first four years I worked at my current agency throwing hair-brained ideas at the co-founder, and it worked – we have ended up crafting excellent digital marketing proposal templates. And to put things into perspective, he probably shot down 80% to 90% of my suggestions. But that did not matter.

This simple structure works for several reasons:

The leadership team has perspective that their team members do not have – this allows them to better act as a filter. Leadership has a wider view of the company as a whole, of resource constraints, of capabilities & expertise, etc.

Our team members, on the other hand, are not constrained by these limitations. Thus, they are free to be creative and unbiased by any negativity. I encourage them to fire off ideas without judging them – even moonshots – to keep their creativity from getting blocked.

It’s important to note that we create an environment where it’s safe for them to be wrong. As a result, my team members are constantly making suggestions and offering creative insights. This effectively results in a consistent improvement our strategy, processes, and templates.

Every few months we look back and see growth – and that is one of the ways that I define departmental success.

Key Takeaway:
Let the folks on the bottom of the org chart act as a divergent & creative force for innovation. Let the folks on the top of the org chart act as a convergent force or filter.
– ordinary_wylie

This idea changed my life. Let me know how it changes yours in the comments below.