Develop a Strategy

Marketing is far from just running ads. Running ads is perhaps the easiest and fastest way to get people to visit your website. But getting people to your website is not the hard part. Getting people to buy stuff is the real challenge. This is where the data comes in.

Everyone on our team is a specialist. Everyone on our team has Fortune 500 and Big Brand experience. The way the Wheel of Fortune works is that we start off with a strategy specialist. They will articulate what you do differently and better than your competitors. This is the reason people will buy your products, use your services or join your organization. This is the headline for your ads and the text in the banner of your landing page.

Strategy is the key to everything. If it is done well, all you have to do is get it in front of as many people as possible and never in the history of the world have we had more ways to do that.

Drive Traffic

Next you want to apply the strategy to anything that drives traffic to your website, and never before in the history of the world have there been more ways to do that: Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Instagram are the easiest and most popular ways to drive traffic, but this works with emails, influencers, thought leadership, PR, blog posts, flyers, postcards, magazine articles, newspaper ads and virtually anything that makes people aware of your website.

The Smartest People In The World Work With The Bureau Of Small Projects

Literally rocket scientists and brain surgeons: Bill Nye, The Science Guy (CEO of the Planetary Society), Stanford University, Switzerland (yes, the actual country) and many, many more.

At the core of the Wheel of Fortune is a principle called the aggregation of marginal gains—a concept developed by smart guy Dave Brailsford when he took over as head of the British Cycling team in 2002.

Brailsford mused: “It struck me that we should think small, not big, and adopt a philosophy of continuous improvement through the aggregation of marginal gains. Forget about perfection—focus on progression and compound the improvements.”

Applying this to cycling, Brailsford made changes to not only their training but to their bike maintenance, sleeping habits, hygiene and nutrition—seemingly unimportant or unrelated activities—and steered his team to 38 cycling medals (22 of them gold) in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The business world went nuts!

The Wheel of Fortune can also be applied to nondigital spaces such as brick-and-mortar stores and events, but the tracking of the data needs to be more sophisticated.

Make Sure Your Landing Page Converts

At the Bureau of Small Projects, we of course know the power of “thinking small.” Our clientele — startups, nonprofits and businesses that are making a difference in the world — don’t have the deep pockets of Fortune 500 companies and big brands, so they must be smarter and more agile in their branding and marketing efforts.

For our clients every penny counts. The biggest mistake we see people make, even big agencies, is that they run ads but don’t optimize the website. Getting people to visit a website with paid ads is “relatively” easy, getting people to buy stuff is the hardest part of marketing. The most common reasons for this are a poorly designed landing page, price or people just don’t want what you are selling. We can’t do much about the last one, but for the other two you need a website that is optimized for conversion (buying stuff).

It works like this: Make sure you have Google Analytics and heatmap software installed on your website. Look at your analytics data and see how much time the target audience spent on landing page. If it’s only a few seconds, then the problem is most likely with the banner image you chose. The purpose of the banner image is not to explain what you do, but to get people’s attention. It is an extremely competitive world out there, and you have just seconds to get visitors to decide whether they will stay or go.

If they stay on the page for a while, typically 30 to 90 seconds, but don’t buy anything, look at your heatmap data. This, at least for me, is the fun part. It’s like a video game. The heatmap shows you the parts of the page where people spend most of their time. This is displayed with colors like red and yellow. The parts that don’t interest people are displayed in cool colors like blue and purple. The object of the game is simply to get people to scroll to the bottom of the page or click on buttons (hopefully both). And once you understand this, it’s pretty simple. If a section of the page is blue or purple, either write it better or remove it. If there are sections at the bottom that are “hotter” than sections at the top, move them up on the page. If everything is “hot” but nobody is clicking on buttons, then rewrite the calls to action.

It’s easy-peasy (if you understand the Wheel of Fortune).

Learn From Your Heatmaps and Analytics

This part is the key to everything. Now that you have a great strategy, great ads and a great landing page, you need to see how well they do in the real world. This is why you should constantly be looking at the data and adjusting. Analytics will tell you how well the landing page is performing: how much time they spend on the page and what page they go to next. The heatmap will tell you how well each section of a landing page is performing: What paragraphs people like the best, what buttons are being clicked (or not), etc, etc…

Most of the time this data is something like how many visits were generated with the campaign, how long they stayed on the page, the bounce rate (how many pages they looked at) and, most importantly for e-commerce, what they purchased. For a nonprofit, this may be donations or memberships, and for a tech startup, it might be how many people demoed the app.

Just as important as what pages they looked at is to know what specific parts of each page they looked at, too. We need to know which paragraphs interest them the most, what pictures they enjoy, what buttons they click on (if any), and which sections they spend most of their time reading. We use heatmap software for this that displays the points your visitors are interested in as hot colors, like yellow and red, and the parts they don’t like as cool colors, like blue and purple, which allows us to learn about what is working and what isn’t so we can make adjustments.

We get a 10X return on ad spend and want to do the same for you

Because we know the only marketing term any business owner cares about is “ROAS” (Return On Ad Spend). Marketing people love acronyms. Do a Google search for KPI, CPM, PPC, ROI, CPA, CTR, SEO, SEM and see what gibberish comes up. And this is only scratching the tip of the iceberg. Business OWNERS only care about one acronym: ROAS. Return On Ad Spend. This is because ROAS tells them exactly how much income they earn for every dollar they spend on ads. Nothing could be more clear.

But 10X Is Really Hard. It took us 2 years to get our ROAS above 10X. You will see plenty of progress along the way of course. It’s all about the data: Per DesignRush the platform average for Google Ads is 4X-8X, Facebook/Instagram (Meta) is 2X-5X, TikTok is 1.5X-3X and YouTube gets 1X-3X. Across industries Retail averages 3X-6X and B2B 1X-2X (3X-6X if you retain clients well). Yet we do much better.

This is because a powerful brand does more than look good, it brings people into your orbit. And that makes marketing a whole lot cheaper and easier. If you have a powerful brand you don’t need clever ads, all you need is to get your value proposition in front of as many people as possible. And the good news is that never in the history of the world has there been more ways to do that. At the Bureau of Small Projects, we get a 10X or more Return On Ad Spend by “thinking small”. This comes from a concept called the “aggregation of marginal gains”. SMALL changes based on data that have a BIG impact on your organization.