This piece on First Round starts with some very basic elements of the three buckets for prospects, which is refreshing; it wasn’t full of nonsensical over elaborate descriptions of what is actually basic. The best part of the article was the very fundamental focus on sound strategies Facebook used in growing the international business.

As facebook expanded markets, the team focused on three areas:
Reduce friction for prospective customers. How often do you find yourself frustrated by the process of buying a product or service. Too often, companies rely on the buyer’s enthusiasm to power through the friction of purchasing, and enough buyers do so for many companies to make a go of it. But the really fast growth companies don’t rely on the enthusiasm of the buyers to push through friction, but focus on removing the friction.

• Leverage resources / experts in the market. We see companies introduce products based on ideas from people who often don’t have to use it in the same context as the target marketing. Facebook had the resources to identify and leverage market experts.
• Test constantly. The premise of testing constantly is actually very humbling. By committing to constant testing you admit you don’t know. This is the key focus on the testing even that which appears successful.
• At its simplest, facebook’s international growth strategy was a classic crawl-walk-run approach. Introduce, learn, grow. Then keep learning and growing.

The piece has more detail and is well written, worth the time.

Hope you enjoy.
http://firstround.com/review/heres-what-a-real-growth-strategy-looks-like-road-tested-by-facebook-and-remind/

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While I applaud the continued push to connect online ad expenditures to off-line results, articles like this in the WSJ make it seem like digital marketers haven’t been thinking about this for decades. Now that Facebook is now putting money behind methodologies that have been around for well over 30 years, it is being treated as some kind of new concept. Keep on studying, but lets not kid ourselves, this is old school research applied to ‘new’ media (I hesitate to call internet advertising new anymore.)

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