Khaana turns 2: A look back…and ahead

Two years have flown by since Khaana Marketing, LLC was founded. For our second anniversary, I thought it would be fun and instructive to look back at everything that has happened during that time. It’s been a great journey with many evolutions—and lots of lessons learned. First, a little bit of history: June 12, 2017 wasn’t a hard deadline to get the company’s legal entity formed, but I wanted it to coincide with the launch of the website. In turn, I wanted the website up and running before I attended Summer Fancy Foods in New York City so I could properly introduce the company to one of the world’s biggest food trade shows. The conference started around June 26, so the entity was formed just in time to pull everything together. I’ll never forget the nervous energy I had as I walked into the Javits Center on the West side of Manhattan and got in line to get my badge. I had headphones on and was listening to music (rap, if I remember right). My mind’s fantasy envisioned an athlete as he arrives to the stadium for a big game. Nerves, anticipation, butterflies…I had it all. I stepped into the main hall and struck up a conversation with one of the first booths I came across. Dropping the pitch was so much easier than I expected—it just flowed naturally. I must have covered hundreds of booths during the next two and a half days. Mostly warm receptions but some not so much, especially as the show wore on and stress and fatigue started to take a toll on the exhibitors’ moods. The show wound up a success. I secured Hak’s as one of my very first clients, and I’m pleased to report that they remain a client to this day. A lot has changed in two short years:

• Khaana’s focus has expanded well beyond food, with healthcare, tech, and consumer products joining the mix.
• It’s not just me anymore. Jen Reed joined the team in 2019. She’s a tremendous creative and a huge asset to the company.
• The brand has come into its own, with the tagline “The Convergence of Art and Analytics” succinctly summarizing the unique balance between the creative and the quantitative, engineering sides of marketing.
• We’re on the third iteration of the website.
• We’ve graduated to accounting software (no more Google sheets!).
• We’ve learned that while we sell a lot of things, we absolutely don’t sell marketing (more on this below).

As we mark this second anniversary, the most exciting part of the journey for me has been the lessons learned.

Lesson 1: Marketing, especially digital, is complex and difficult to navigate for many organizations

This might seem obvious, but it’s multi-layered. Most organizations are executing marketing activities in some way, and the majority are at least tinkering with some forms of digital marketing. Despite having these rudimentary efforts underway, however, they often lack a cohesive strategy and their activities aren’t closely matched to ROI. These issues are more pronounced at smaller organizations, but they persist at larger ones as well (albeit stemming from different causes). Smaller organizations often lack the ability to investigate the full suite of marketing options, so they gravitate toward what they are familiar with or what the person tasked with marketing is skilled at. Larger organizations get into patterns based on what was done before, especially if they had success with an activity in the past year or two. Some organizations also start developing vendor relationships which begin to drive the marketing plan over time. These forces inhibit change and limit options. Two major factors that drive complexity:

• Ever-changing technologies
  • Marketing technology is in an unprecedented state of innovation.
  • That’s great for marketing in general, as there’s so many new ways to reach customers.
  • The high rate of change is difficult to keep up with, and even practitioners like us are challenged to keep up.
  • The good news is that for every new tech or nuanced need, there is always a subject matter expert, so no one has to know everything
• Data, data, data
  • Digital marketing is creating a tremendous amount of data. Customer information, usage patterns, and campaign performance are just a few major sources.
  • Making sense of it all is growing harder and harder.
  • The market has yet to develop great comprehensive data management tools.

Lesson 2: ROI is on everyone’s minds

We haven’t met an organization yet that wasn’t keen on understanding exactly what return it would achieve from its marketing efforts—but understanding how to measure it and which marketing activities map to which objectives varies widely. On the sophisticated end, the CFO of a venture-funded startup told us a great story about a marketing exec who came to a meeting prepared with an Excel spreadsheet which showed the cost of every single marketing activity and its expected return, whether that was leads, sales booked, or dollars added to the pipeline. Those expectations were followed by conversion rates that projected a hard dollar amount against which they could measure actual results. Talk about a marketer after our own heart! Unfortunately, that level of rigor is not common. In fact, we’ve attended marketing seminars on ROI in which the instructor wasn’t doing the simple arithmetic correctly. And the lack of comprehensive reporting tools isn’t making life any easier. The good news is that there are marketers who get it, and financial analysts can play a role in helping to craft the ROI reporting. A strong partnership between finance and marketing increases the value of both organizations. And it goes without saying, sales and marketing must be on the same page for either to succeed.

Lesson 3: The swimming pool vs. the hole in the ground

This might be one of the biggest lessons…not so much learned as reinforced over the last two years. The analogy goes like this: Let’s say you want a pool in the backyard. You hire a company to build one, but you pay just enough to dig the hole in the ground and then stop. Now you’re out a lot of money, and you don’t have a pool…just a big, useless, ugly hole in the ground. Marketing is much the same way. First of all, marketing costs money. Just like sales, production, logistics, shipping, distribution, and management. Most importantly, it takes a certain amount of money to achieve a certain result, and there are minimum required investments in many cases. Spending a little but not enough (just to try it out or “dip our toe in the water”) is often the most wasteful approach, and you’re better off not spending at all.

Here’s the right way to do it:

• Clearly define your goal (number of leads to generate,  desired amount of incremental sales, brand awareness, customer development).
• Create the right strategy to meet those goals.
• Allocate a budget amount that you’re comfortable with, and make sure it’s enough to achieve the result.

• Run the test. Be patient.
• Measure, tweak, and optimize.

Lesson 4: Every project begins with listening

An ideal project for us begins with an assessment phase where we get to know the organization, including its story, brand, current marketing activities, and the thought processes of the key stakeholders. From there, we create a tailored strategy. Not every organization needs every aspect of such a thorough analysis, but we haven’t met one yet that didn’t benefit from it. Perhaps the best example of this was our work with Austin Retina Associates. We spent the first two months learning about the organization, talking to every physician, and fielding a patient survey. Not only did we learn a ton, we were able to eliminate some wasteful marketing spend before we even started the execution phase.

Lesson 5: We sell a lot of things, but we don’t sell marketing

Another big foundational lesson. In the beginning, I was talking to very small organizations and navigating their skepticism about the value of marketing. I tried to help them understand what the return might be, tried to appease their concerns, and in the process allowed for initial tests that were waaaayyy too small to make an impact. Our perspective is different now. We can help organizations think through the right strategies, align the right activities to the desired outcomes, navigate the ever-changing landscape of marketing options, and measure ROI. We sell growth, awareness, brand, strategy, advertising, websites, and ecommerce solutions, just to name a few. But we don’t sell marketing. We love to work with organizations that know they need marketing, but need help figuring it out.

With all that said, it’s been a great two years and we’re energized by what we’ve learned and the opportunity to help more organizations (and learn even more). Here’s to the future!