Mach 1 Design Secret Sauce

The Best 3 Ingredients for Digital Marketing

The questions like:

When am I going to start seeing results?
How much am I going to spend on testing?
How fast can we scale up?

come up frequently as we’re talking to companies who are considering working with us to grow their business. Whether they are just starting out on a new eCommerce store or looking to increase their leads 2x in a month, the underlying question is really the same.

How can Match 1 Design get things done, effectively?

Let us show you our 3 secret ingredients on Mach 1 Design’s secret sauce.

Secret 1 : Traction

Most of the complex things have no shortcut. You have to walk before you can run.

If your business has never run an ad before, never used marketing to sell, never attempted to convince someone unfamiliar with the brand, product, or service that they should part with their hard-earned Benjamin Franklins, then your first question should not be, “How much can I make?”

You don’t have TRACTION yet.

By traction I mean a pattern of desired behavior occurring in a consistent, somewhat predictable fashion. This could mean generating leads, getting purchases, onboarding new users or whatever else your business goal, it doesn’t matter. The point is that you need to be able to say that you can cause it to happen, repeatedly, with your efforts. When we work with clients who have never run ads before, or who are just starting out, our first forays out into the marketplace are focused on finding who will buy and what will cause them to buy. Put another way, this is about audience and creative/offer.

How can I build the TRACTION?

You have to wade through scores of unqualified or uninterested people to find your best candidates, and then test multiple different messages, angles, images, videos, taglines and more in order to find traction.

“Okay, but how long does that take?”
Well, that depends.

I know, that’s not what you were hoping for. And if I can tell you that it would take 2 weeks or 2 months or whatever, I definitely would. Instead, here’s what I can tell you:

It depends on spend. The more budget you can put behind your testing, the faster you can reach statistical significance and launch new tests. That means you find what works and what doesn’t faster.
It depends on history. Have you already run some tests? Maybe you did some ads with another partner or on your own, or maybe you’ve got another channel working. The more available data, the better the foundation the tests start from.
It depends on business maturity. If you already have an organic base of buyers or subscribers, if you already have a few thousand app users, if you’ve done some offline marketing that worked, that all feeds the machine. Starting from scratch takes longer than using something pre-made.

When you work with us, you aren’t hiring wizards (or gurus or ninjas) – you’re hiring data-driven marketers. So we’re going to test, and test, and test, and generate lots of data, and then we’re going to do what the data tells us.

Sometimes it’s fast, and we see traction in just a few weeks. Sometimes it takes less time, sometimes it takes longer. All the factors above impact that.

But the good news is, once you have TRACTION, you can move on to start thinking about…

Secret 2 : Profit

Too many times we’ll talk to a business owner who is putting money into ads and wants to see immediate return. If they don’t get a certain CPA or ROAS in the first 3 weeks, they think there’s something “wrong” with the ads. They don’t realize they are trying to run before walking, that you can’t build a house without the foundation, or whatever analogy you best identify with.

Once we help our clients find TRACTION, then (and only then) is it time to start discussing PROFIT.

Why?

If you don’t have enough data points, you can’t optimize.

Put another way, if you don’t have anyone buying from you, how do you know who your best customers are?

Getting this data and acting on it is the basis of improving your PROFIT metrics. If you want a better CPA, you need to find out which creative gets the best response and then test small optimizations on it – a new emoji, a different headline, a carousel vs a static image. If you want better ROAS, you can segment by device type or placement or time of day that gives you the best baseline.

The key to the PROFIT stage is having goals. And I don’t mean “I want to retire and sleep on a bed of Andrew Jacksons every night” type goals, more like “If I can generate new users for $20 each that means I’m profitable and am basically printing money” goals.