Mistakes in Advertising Campaigns

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we are looking at the mistakes that we've made. In this episode, we're going to talk about, to flash forward a little bit, and a little more recent, talk about some of the business related mistakes that I've made. Now we did talk about my first interview, but this episode I want to talk about my first attempt at advertising campaign. In particular, this had to do with a book, first book that I wrote way back, well, way back, a few years ago. It was one of those things that was done, in my defense, as sort of a, I guess a trial kind of thing. I wanted to get to know how the industry worked a little bit, take a look at some of the things that are out there. So I had a budget, essentially. I said, well, here's about what I'm willing to spend on advertising. I'm going to go ahead and look at some options out there. This is not like a search campaign or something like that. This is more of an actual, get somebody that says that they are good at promoting this particular type of product, and knows the rights, has the right mailing lists, and those kinds of things, and say, okay, go ahead and put together a campaign, put together some stuff for me, and launch it and let's see what happens. Now, this was done for a book that did not have, it's just a sort of a, I guess a biography type of book. So it didn't have a lot of flashy stuff or anything like that. It was like fiction or something where you could, there was a whole lot that you were going to do to sell it. And interesting enough, they really didn't provide me much as far as selling. It was really, here, we'll give you a template, and you give us the book cover, you give us a synopsis of the book, and we'll make some adjustments and go forward. This is where all of it became pretty interesting, because they weren't really good on the edit and the back and forth. And I probably should have pulled out sooner rather than later. Actually, I didn't, I guess, at all. It was one of those things, I probably shouldn't have paid them. But they worked this out in a way that it was basically, hey, you have to pay up front. And I don't remember the amount, but that's not really particular. It wasn't cheap. It wasn't super expensive either, which is probably why I maybe fell for it a little bit. So I went in, said, okay, we'll do this. This is what I want you to do. Here's the basics of, here's the book cover, here's the basics about it. And they sent it back to me, and it was incorrect. They had rewritten some stuff, and they wrote things wrong. They took some stuff that was, I think, out of some reviews and things like that, that basically misstated the synopsis of the book. And they sent it back, and I said, no, correct here, here, here, and here. And they sent back, okay, we've corrected those. I'm like, okay, but they didn't send me proof again. One of our first learning points here. If you're doing anything of this nature, where there is a product that is creative of any way, which includes advertisements, includes actually our products, software products that we typically build, on both sides of it, there should be a back of forth. There should be a user acceptance. There should be something where you say, okay, this is what you asked for. This is what I built. Is that correct? Or do we need to make some adjustments? In my case, I didn't get that last one. I got an initial one that was just basically, hey, here it is. Do you have any changes? I said, yes, I have changes. They said, okay, we made the changes. They did not confirm for me. And they went ahead and ran it at whatever time it was. And I think it was like one of these things, they were going to run this thing for two weeks or with a batch of users or whatever it was. And I didn't get to know, I wasn't told until like a month later that they had run it. I was also not shown the end product until a month after they had run it when I was able to see that they really hadn't made any of the corrections. Maybe one. I mean, it was like maybe one or two corrections they made. But essentially, they went with their first thing. They ran it, didn't tell me about it, didn't give me heads up, didn't give me any statistics on it. Just said, hey, we ran it. So it was really a hey, trust us, we ran it. I'm sure it worked well. And it didn't I didn't see any any bumps. I didn't see any I mean, not like even the slightest of bump and traffic. So for all I know, they never actually ran it or it never went to a real email list. Now, that being said, there are a lot of things that we can learn from this that I learned from it. The first one is for something like that, don't pay or at least don't pay all until you can confirm that they are producing what they say they're going to produce. And it's maybe you guys may be thinking, well, yeah, of course, don't trust people. But I do. And I know some people do because they are like me where you'll you're sort of new to a business and somebody will say, oh, well, this is how it works. You'll say, OK, well, if you're not comfortable with it, I don't care how it works. Push back. So if they say, well, you have to pay us upfront. And I see this in consulting stuff on a fairly regular basis where it's like, hey, you have to pay us. And, you know, not just now a portion would make sense. There has to be, you know, essentially some earnest money sometimes because both sides need to learn to trust each other. Or it may be that there's some investment that if you're hiring somebody that they have to make. So it's OK to, you know, I would say and I will do this at times as well, depending on how my relationship is with a customer. As I may say, you know, hey, we need, you know, 10 percent up front or 25 percent up or maybe half half at the beginning and half on delivery. That kind of stuff all makes sense. What you want to do is make sure that the. There's enough of it withheld until they actually deliver. So that you can you had some leverage to say, hey, you need to fix this or you didn't do what was promised. That is something other than trying to track them down legally. So the first thing is keep some leverage. Don't pay the whole thing up until it's complete. And this should be with pretty much anything you deal with, but particularly in the software world, because it's really easy for stuff to get vague or not get done correctly. And if you pay up front, then you're sort of stuck. You're sort of just trusting them and vice versa. If somebody wants you to get something done. And you say, oh, we're going to wait until, you know, we won't charge you until it's delivered. Then you can also get in trouble. And that's some other stories that will be further down the line. So first one is make sure that you have the right amount of leverage. The second one, which goes sort of to this latter part, is when you walk into this kind of a situation or really just about any kind of situation, you need to have some comfort level with how they are going to confirm that the work was done. And something like this, when we get into advertising, what you want to do is be able to have something other than just they say they ran it or they advertised it. Some confirmation, some way you can look at it and say, okay, yes, it went to this place, this spot ran this long, whatever it is. So that you can come back and confirm it. Yep, they ran it. And if it didn't work, it didn't work. But don't just get in a situation like I did where you have to pretty much just take their word for it. I mean, it's one of those things that like here they said, I think they had a million people on this list and I didn't get one really, I don't think I could have shown like one link, one click that was done on it, which could be really horrible advertising, but more likely you figured just on accident somebody is going to click on it. So it probably didn't run, which one you need to have some key performance indicator. They called KPIs and you'll see this in if you do any ads like Google ads or Bing ads or things like that, which is probably not a bad place to start is play around. Just find something worth spending a few bucks a day on advertising for a little bit and just play around with that interface, you know, with either the Bing or the Google or whatever ads interface or even Facebook, any of those, and it will help you understand a little better if you don't already. How ads should work and what some of the expectations may be to define your target audience, but also to score how well something does. And there's tons of books on it. But you know, that's yet another thing is it doesn't hurt to do a little research before you step into something new. A little bit about, you know, we've talked about risk and acceptable risk. And this same thing, I didn't have. I really, when I went into this, did not have a way to vet my opportunities. So this company that I worked with, I didn't really I wasn't able to do enough research. I wasn't able to find enough on them to confirm that, yeah, they're good or or no, they're not. I just looked at the price range sort of a couple of quick searches that, yeah, this looks good. Taking my time on that probably cost me. If I had or not taking my time on that, I guess, if I had taken my time, done more research, looked for some reviews, looked for some examples and pushed more instead of letting them really drive the process, then I think it would have been much better. And so that's yet another little lesson there is don't be afraid when you are in a position that you should at least have a say, if not be driving a process that you do so. You know, there's there's something to be said for being a nice guy and all that, but it's usually that that just means somebody can take advantage of you. And that doesn't mean don't be a nice guy or gal, but it does mean that you need to be aware of what you're stepping into and don't be afraid to stick up for yourself, even if it's something that you if it's something you feel you don't have enough knowledge about, then find somebody to be sort of an advocate for you in that that area or do some more research so that you are at a point where you are comfortable enough saying, hey, that's that's not right. There are other companies that do this differently. If you want to do it this way, that's fine. But I'm going to walk. I will take my business elsewhere. This will help you with a lot of negotiating type of situations is don't be afraid to walk away. Don't be afraid to say, you know what? This doesn't smell right. This doesn't sound right. So I'm not going to do this. I am not going to do it this way. And that is a great lesson from a I think a career perspective. I think far too many of us in the IT world in particular, because we're not HR knowledgeable, HR sensitive, all of that kind of stuff. We basically just want to do our job when it comes to interviewing, when it comes to asking for offers, job offers, when it comes to a lot of that kind of recruiting and job stuff. And even once we're in a job, when we get into our, you know, whatever it is, annual review process, we have to I think we tend to be much more passive because we just would rather not deal with it. We rather go do our job. And that can allow us to be taken advantage of. I don't know how many places I've been where somebody is a phenomenal technician. They're incredibly skilled and they're getting paid almost nothing because they never really they never ask for a raise. They never push and say, hey, I'm I'm providing some value here. You're not even keeping up with cost of living or why is it I'm one of the best producers and yet I'm constantly in the bottom bracket of of raises or bonuses or anything like that. And it's. It's hard to do that sometimes. I get that. But if you don't unless you like have a manager or somebody like that, like a pro sports type person, unless you hire somebody to be your advocate, you need to advocate for yourself. You need to be. Comfortable enough, and even if you're not comfortable, you need to push yourself to be able to walk into some of these kinds of discussions and situations and say, hey, this is what I bring to the table. This is what the market is, how the market values that skill set or those things that I bring. And I'm I'm not being you're not paying me. You know, my compensation is not what the market is. You know, average is much less getting above it. If I'm giving above providing above average value. Now, this does come back to KPIs, you know, key performance indicators. You want those when you are buying something, when you're purchasing something, you want to be able to say, hey, this is how effective my purchase has been. But you also want to be aware of that when you are providing a product. What is it that my boss, my customer, whoever it is, is going to look for to say that, yes, this is a value or it's not. And so if you aren't comfortable with the idea of KPIs, if that's sort of, let's say, a new kind of thing to you, a new concept, then I would say do a little research on it. And it's like you can do KPI or key performance indicators and you will find some nice articles that are just this is what they are. This is how they are. And you can probably if there's any area that you you want specifics is if you go search, you know, do a search key of like KPI or key performance indicators and then your topic, then I just about guarantee you will find some article on that. And that helps immensely. So I don't want to go too long because there's a lot of lessons that could be learned with this, but I do want to say that your return on investment is important. So is your customers. So if you're going into something saying I just need the work done or I just need to get the work done, then you're missing part of the equation. We've talked about like the why or what is the problem they're solving? What is the solution that actually solves that problem? Those are essentially KPIs. Those are your ROI. If you're spending this this amount of time, you should get this product or this productivity back. And whether you are paying for somebody to do that or somebody's paying you. That should always be a part of the equation, a part of the discussion. I mean, just think if you have somebody, if you pay somebody to, I don't know, wash dishes when you're done, when they're done, you expect clean dishes and it's you may specify which dishes and stuff like that, but it's a very simple KPI. It's either they are done or they're not. When you get into the world of software and products and usability and so many other things, it's, it's a little more murky. So it will take a little bit of time to be able to really, you know, get that done correctly, to figure that out and have some metrics, some way that you can measure success, because if you don't can't measure success and you're not going to know if you're successful or not, you may have a feeling about it, but that's just your feeling. What you really want is something that you can, you know, in black and white say this was a success. This is a partial success. This was a failure. This was a partial failure. That is how you're going to get better is to be able to measure how close or far you are from success. And that being said, I think we are close enough to the end that we're going to wrap this one up. So as always go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from building better developers, the developer podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa. Now you can enable us by simply saying Alexa enable building better developers. And we will be there ready for you. Every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast, whether we are your favorite podcast or not, we would love to hear from you. So please leave a review on Amazon.