The one thing that will instantly make you a better marketer.
Chances are, you’re on your way in the London Tube, or riding an Uber, or sipping on your evening coffee while having a scroll through, and you’ve clicked on hoping to find a tradecraft secret which will make you the ultimate communicator.
You will- this isn’t clickbait.
Before proceeding, have a quick glance around. Try to absorb just how many people are using their devices at this very moment. Some people are working, some are chatting, some are shopping, some are playing games, but most people are occupied on their mobile phones.
If you’re a marketer, you understand the significance of this observation, and the opportunity it possesses. In this day and age, people are chugging information and increasingly, digitally. If as a business, you’re not selling online or at least communicating your message online, you do not exist. You need to have some form of online presence, something that bridges the information gap between you and your tech-savvy customer. I know as responsible marketers, you always highlight this and work smart towards this, so I don’t need to emphasise this further.
A lot of our job involves content, targeting, optimizing, re-targeting and re-structuring, and so on and so forth.
We supplement our instincts to read people, with highly-accurate predictive technologies, and we know exactly in every moment, what people are searching for.
Large chunks of company budgets get allocated to marketing-communications, and marketers work like machines (although significantly more intuitive: a bit like Professor X above) to push the creative juice out. We inject ideas into people’s minds as sight, scent, sounds, touch and everything else in between, to pass on what is essentially a simple message. We’re constantly online with the user, as if we were on the other side of a mirror, like a spot-on reflection. We’re trying to be less and less intrusive, truly, but we are still looking to understand how to serve them best.
In this chaos, marketers often lose sight of what matters most.
Spoiler: it isn’t your client, it isn’t your creativity, it isn’t the tools you have available, it isn’t even always the medium or the channel you use to put the message through. Truthfully? it’s not even the message in itself.
Read what I said in the beginning again, but keeping an emphasis on something different this time:
“Have a quick glance around. Try to absorb just how many people are using their devices at this very moment. Some people are working, some are chatting, some are shopping, some are playing games, but most people are occupied on their mobile phones.”
People. Doesn’t matter what they’re doing or how they’re using their phones, what matters is it’s still real, human, people at the end of the spectrum. Homo sapiens who feel.
None of your research matters if your plan isn’t centred around people. Your product doesn’t matter if it doesn’t serve people. Your message doesn’t matter if the channel doesn’t lead to people. Your words don’t matter if they don’t invoke feelings in people.
We get so engrossed in thinking about the new big ideas that we forget to consider who they must serve. To me, the trick is to always keep people at the centre of the marketing equation. For something so trivial and textbook, you’d be surprised to know how many professionals obsess over content and new platforms and experiments, and side-line the end user completely. Rookie error.
Just because TikTok is “fresh”, doesn’t mean you need to stick your leg into the TikTok door- If your user isn’t on TikTok, you (and your money) don’t belong on TikTok.
I know Facebook is a great place to advertise, but if your end users are conservative about, say, privacy issues (a bit of socio-political awareness goes a long way), you can skip hopping on the Facebook bandwagon for the time being.
Consider their opinions, ideas, motivations, aspirations, emotions, disappointments, hopes, excitements, fundamentally everything that makes your user human. Believe me, no AI can ever truly predict human nature, so put that missing variable back into the equation.
Basically, if you don’t consider the person behind the screen: You’re winking in the dark thinking you’re flirting. You’re nose-diving towards the Earth thinking you’re flying. You’re voting for Trump thinking America will be great again (+5 pts. for a socio-political reference?).
