The 95-5 %, 5-95% Rule

Why are some brands so successful online (for instance Burger King) while other similar brands (McDonald’s) perform so poorly?

At Lateral Amsterdam we immodestly think we have found the answer, and we decided to call it “The 95-5%, 5-95% Rule”. (reasons being that it is pretty accurate and it sounds very Seth Godin like)

The first part of the rule, 95-5%, refers to the budget.

Successful online marketers spend at least 5% of their budget on online campaigns.

By this 5% we don’t mean online direct marketing efforts, but pure online branding budget.

We make this distinction because the first is often very predictable and always very measurable, where online branding is never predictable and hard to measure precisely.

The successful online marketer knows this, but does not shy away.

He (or she) knows the 5% of the budget might not do anything for the brand at all, but he also knows it will never be completely wasted.

Because the successful online marketer knows that his brand has to learn how to act online and that the only way of learning that is by doing stuff online.

But spending 5% of the budget without even remotely knowing the final result still isn’t enough.

The 5-95% part of the rule refers to the amount of their time successful marketers spend tracking and improving their campaigns.

Only 5% of a marketer’s time should be spent on (for instance) TV campaigns.

Marketers can spend less of their time on TV-campaigns because we already know a lot about how they work and they are therefore pretty easy to predict, measure and manage.

95% of a marketers time should be spent on online campaigns because we do not know much about how they work yet (and even the little knowledge we do have is rapidly becoming old fashioned) and they are certainly not easy to manage.

Not only does a marketer need to monitor an online campaign constantly in order to take measures in case of a slow start (find out why, make improvements, perhaps raise the budget) , he or she also has to expect the unexpected.

Consumers will do as they please with an online campaigns, which could mean they may love it, ridicule it, spread it, alter it (yes they can!) or totally ignore it.

The marketer needs to be ready to act in all of these cases and when he has acted, he has to be ready to act again, since his new actions will generate new, often unexpected responses.

The 95-5 %, 5-95% Rule means successful online marketers will have to put up with a lot of hard work and even more uncertainty .

Fortunately their chance of success is increased by the 95% of marketers that are just not willing to go there.