The campaign
Barney’s just raised half a million quid from an early stage investor.
It’s time for his business to take off like a moon rocket.
Number one priority? A big marketing campaign.
Hire some new staff. Engage some designers. Hire an agency, and let’s get this spending party started.
Everyone runs around like headless chickens for a few weeks, designing this, optimising that, A/B testing the other, but wait…
Barney can’t shake his bootstrapping instincts.
He thinks can save a few bob by going DIY on the copy.
He’s got an English literature GCSE, and he’s read Lord of The Flies. How hard can it be?
He picks his keyboard and sets to.
He looks around at what other people in the industry are saying.
Barney borrows a word from here and a phrase from there, sprinkles a few “passionates” and “innovatives” on it and whips up a copy storm (he thinks).
Hang it in The Louvre.
A month after the investor’s money hit the bank account, they’re ready to go.
If you include a £1,000 a month budget for Facebook ads, the six month campaign has cost him less than ten grand to set up and run.
The sales plan tells him this campaign should pay for itself in a month, and the company should cover all the new costs and break even by the end of the campaign.
Let’s see.
The cost of being boring.
Barney’s business plan forecasts £10,000 of sales in the first month of the campaign.
That looked quite modest when it was staring out at him from the comfort of a spreadsheet.
But when the rubber meets the road, sales don’t flow quite so freely.
Month 1 sales - £2,000.
Barney has a £20,000 cost base, so what should have been a very manageable £10,000 loss is an £18,000 loss.
He feels a bit of sick come up when he allows his mind to fast forward six months.
The numbers get very big, very quickly. Easily six figures by the end of the campaign if he can’t sort sales.
How will he tell his investors he’d pissed most of their money away for nothing?
In month 2, sales go down. The low hanging fruit has been picked.
The team goes into crisis analysis mode, and someone dares to say the unthinkable.
Barney’s copy isn’t cutting it. It’s boring AF. It isn’t getting any attention.
Barney was about to learn the harshest lesson a business leader can learn.
The real cost of this campaign wasn’t the set up costs.
It wasn’t the advertising costs.
The true cost was the leaky hole in the overheads bucket which wasn’t being plugged by sales.
And what was causing that?
Barney’s boring words.
Words, messaging and campaign copy that had all the appeal of a septic tank.
The cost of the campaign wasn’t the £10,000 to run it.
The real bill was the £100,000 unbudgeted losses (and rising) of the campaign failing.
That’s the cost of being boring.
Once Barney realised if something didn’t change pronto, the future was him handing Meal Deals through Drive-Thru windows, he got the pros in to fix it.
Turns out the cost of getting help is a lot, lot less than the cost of being boring.