To get a better handle on the things that go wrong with your marketing, the things that stand in the way of your success, think of them as villains: just as the Disney heroes and heroines must battle their foes, so must you battle yours.

Many of the best stories in history—Disney’s history included—feature a different kind of villain. This villain is more insidious than any evil mastermind could be. It creates the deepest kind of connection between the hero and the story for both character and audience.

This villain is the hero’s “inner conflict.” It’s a much more useful plot device in story than it is in marketing, but we’ll get to that shortly.

Characters who have no inner qualms or pains can end up feeling flat and disconnected from the story. Inner struggles give them dimension and a reason to push through and win the day. Disney is no stranger to the “inner demon.”

In Frozen, the “bad guy,” of course, is the dastardly prince trying to seize control of Elsa’s queendom. But the aspects that make the story different and more interesting from other stories are Elsa’s fear of her own power and the conflict between Elsa and Anna who also, as in most Disney movies, lost their parents—and their baby brother!—just as the story begins.

In Wreck-It Ralph, the initial catalyst for all of the trouble is Ralph’s desire to overcome his own nature (that of the “bad guy,” of course). In his quest to prove he can be the good guy, too, he unwittingly unleashes the Cy-Bugs which then drive the plot forward.

While these inner demons might make for great storytelling in entertainment, in marketing they add little to no value. It’s often quite the opposite.

Delays in production or delivery, in-fighting among staff, budget overruns, and other impediments only cause more pain for both company and customer. Your customers will not find “entertainment value” in these situations—they want their problems solved, and they want them solved now.

What kinds of problems are “inner demons?”

• Budget and deadline pressure
• Customer expectations
• Lack of expertise to solve a specific problem
• Bad assumptions
• Doubts in our “message”
• Quotas and earnings targets
• Over-utilization of employees
• Poor employee performance

Each of these (and others besides them) create pressures, distractions, and missteps that cost money and can harm the brand. Your business may not experience all of these, but it will almost certainly encounter one or two at the least.

We must have a plan to deal with these inner demons. We must come to recognize and understand the kinds of problems we will face so that they have as little an effect as possible (preferably none) on our customer.

If your “inner demon” is a lack of expertise, for example, how will you solve for it? Will you hire an expert in-house, or maybe a freelancer? Can you avoid the need for that expertise in some way? Likewise, if you face doubts in your message, take the time to stop, define the message more clearly, and make sure everyone on your team understands it and has internalized it. Regardless of the demons you face, though, you must deal with them or they will eat you alive.

There’s something else to note about our two types of villains: the first villain usually cares absolutely nothing about the second. In other words, your customer’s problem is completely independent of your company’s. Your customer, therefore, will not care about what’s wrong inside your company as long as it doesn’t disturb the solution to their own problem.

There is an exception to that rule, and that’s poor employee performance when that employee is interacting with a customer. If a customer has a poor sales or customer-service experience because of your inner demons, they will most certainly care about your problems, and you will have yet another issue to contend with.

Continued in "Marketing the Magic"!

Every good story has a "twist". It's one of the things that makes a story memorable. But you don't want your marketing to have "twists"; you want the plan to proceed exactly as you envision, start to finish. But there's always a twist. And it's up to you to deal with it.

Despite the best laid plans of “mice” and men, the hero’s path to victory is seldom straightforward. There’s nearly always some kind of “twist” in the plot, like the villain not being who we thought it would be.

As the audience, we wouldn’t really want it any other way, would we? “The twist” adds intrigue and detail. It would usually be pretty boring if the hero just walked up to the villain exactly according to plan, bonked him on the head, and walked out with the princess in his arms.

One of the more memorable recent examples of a twist from Disney comes from the movie Frozen. Intrepid co-heroine Anna has the good fortune to meet another younger royal sibling and seemingly perfect match in Prince Hans. They seem to be made for each other, becoming engaged almost immediately, and then: the twist.

After Anna suffers a horrible accident while chasing Elsa, Hans leans in to give “the fairytale kiss” to save her, then reveals himself as the true villain of the story. His goal has been to take control of Arendelle all along!

Now isn’t that more interesting than, “Elsa freaks out, then Anna convinces her to come back,” for a plotline? Of course.

The problem is that while the audience is more entertained by twists and turns, the heroes of these stories would most certainly prefer to avoid them. Getting back to marketing, remember that our companies are the heroes. I know that I could do just fine without any twists and turns in my marketing efforts.

Just as in good storytelling, though, the twist is generally going to be unavoidable. But what is the twist when it comes to marketing?

As I mentioned in the last chapter, we must be patient and allow good data to gather before analyzing and making changes to our campaigns. When we allow that data to gather and discover that we’re not making progress toward our goals (or not progressing quickly enough), we’ve encountered a twist.

That’s okay! Just as our beloved heroes always find a way to best the twists and turns in their stories, we can beat ours. It’s a rare situation when a campaign finds immediate success. Rather than hoping that’s the case and starting over if it isn’t, we merely need to be prepared to deal with these twists when they come. We do that by gathering great data, and we get great data by setting up great tests.

It’s not enough to merely analyze the basic data on our campaigns. Click-through rates, conversion rates, costs per click, and so forth are foundational key performance indicators—I’m not suggesting otherwise. They give us the information we need to determine what is working and what isn’t, but we need more.

More important than what is or isn’t working is knowing why something is or isn’t working. Simply being able to show that Ad #1 had a click-through rate of .5% and a conversion rate of 10% is valuable. Knowing what it was about Ad #1 that made it perform the way it did compared to Ad #2 is how we unearth marketing gold.

We determine the “why” by properly testing our marketing campaigns. This is yet another topic that I can’t cover in full detail here, but we can establish a foundation in what testing looks like and how it works (and doesn’t).

If you’re a business owner implementing your own marketing, I hope to give you at least a good starting point for honing better campaigns. If you have staff or contractors implementing your marketing, you’ll have a much better understanding of the kind of testing they’re doing (or ought to be doing) and why you might seem to be “wasting” a little more money at the beginning of your campaigns.

If you’re a marketer and you aren’t using proper testing yet, go read every book and blog post and watch every video on the subject that you can get your hands on. Your clients and fellow marketers will thank you.

Now then, how do we properly test marketing campaigns?

Most often, we’re talking about either “split testing” (also known as A/B testing) or “multivariate testing.” These are two methods of uncovering “the why,” and you’ll want to use both.

Continued in "Marketing the Magic"!