Career Boost 3Career Boost 3 is the ability to make your program more profitable every year. You're probably familiar with the story of W. Edwards Deming, the management guru. More than half a century ago, Deming promoted a simple but powerful idea. His idea made Japan into an industrial powerhouse with the world's most efficient factories. In recent years it became the basis of Total Quality Management (TQM) programs. This simple but powerful idea is, of course, optimization. Fine-tuning. In simple words, optimization means: 1. Find out what works well, and then do more of it. Pretty simple, wouldn't you say? And yet, very few advertising and public relations people apply it. That's because we usually don't know what's working, or how to find out. You've heard the old Madison Avenue joke: "Half of my advertising program is working, but I don't know which half." Jokes aside, what would happen if you did know what works and what doesn't? It would be Career Boost 3. It would give you the ability to double or triple the results of your program – or do even better. That would be a great career boost. It's Easy to Set UpFor example, suppose for the sake of simplicity that you are running an advertising program that includes only three tactics. Let's also suppose that you are allocating equal resources to each tactic. Then suppose that you measured the profitability of each tactic and you found that:Tactic A was breaking even. By the way, this hypothetical example is fairly typical. Although we tend to assume that all our tactics are more or less equally profitable, the opposite is true. In most advertising and PR programs, a minority of the tactics produces a majority of the profit. I've even seen programs in which one "home run" tactic, all by itself, produced almost all of the profit. It's not uncommon. In fact, you'll recognize that this is just one more example of the famous Pareto Principle, informally known as "The 80-20 Rule." How to Begin OptimizingTo begin optimizing your hypothetical ad program, you just expand Tactic C and reduce Tactics A and B. Your budget remains the same, but now you're doing more of what works well.When you take your next look at your results, your overall profitability is likely to be much higher. That's good, but you don't stop there. Once again, you compare the results of the different tactics and make another adjustment – always shifting funds to the more-profitable tactics. You repeat this process, continuously improving your profitability. You're building your own Career Boost 3. A Comforting Thing to KnowAnd if, by some chance, your overall program isn't profitable right now, optimization probably can make it profitable: just identify which parts are profitable now, and expand those parts. When your overall program is profitable, you can show the results to management.That's a comforting thing to know, when you're just getting started. Whatever baseline you start from, you can make simple changes that will help you achieve much more with the same budget. But as you move forward, you might not be stuck with the same budget. Your optimization program might earn you a much larger budget, as your management sees what you've accomplished. That's Career Boost 3. I've given you a lot of very positive thinking here. I also feel compelled to mention one negative point: do not wait too long to start an ROI measurement and optimization program. Please read about
why I urge you not to wait.
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