Once More With Feeling

Stop leading with complexity, and make that “first contact” feel like a call from an old friend.”

Excerpt from the book

Chapter 2 — Why Does This Happen?

“ It’s Carpet. It’s Madness. It’s Carpet Madness”
~ Local Radio Advertisement, Anon

In a carpet shop, you know how you’re doing by seeing the hundreds of yards of carpet being sold every week. It’s a very measurable result. Yeah – there’s good and bad carpet – but at the end of the day, it’s just carpet and it’s sold by the yard. Literally measured out to customers every day.

This is how I believe a lot of marketing and communications departments work. They are measured on the amount of communicating they do, not necessarily the quality. I met a social media manager once who presented a plan to create 60 pieces of content every month in the next year for its audience of channel subscribers. Maybe one or two of them might be remarkable. Most of them must surely be mediocre at best? They were carpet-bombing their prospects and customers with information.

When I challenged these people, they all had excuses.

Excuse #1: “It’s what we’ve always done”

This company was caught in a culture of volume vs vitality. It’s no wonder at all that their language became prosaic and boring. Their marketing plans were borne out of habit. Habit is the reason most things in large businesses happen. People ask: “What do we normally do?” rather than: “What do we need to do?” They forget about the real objectives.

By “real” objectives I mean the business plan, not the activity plan. The objective of a social media plan is not the generation of 60 pieces of content every month. That’s simply the output. It’s the activity plan.

The real objective should surely be something like hitting a market share target or a sales target. Too often we replace the objective with the task. “Our plan is to create a video.” No – your plan is to increase awareness so that sales go up. Or your plan is to reach every employee so we can change behaviour. Creating the video is just the tactic.

When so many things are being created we just get into bad habits that perpetuate in a culture where nobody wants to rock the boat. That is why so much crap gets created. At best you’re creating huge amounts of ignored noise. At worst it’s the lion’s share of your annual budget down the toilet. Especially if it’s not just blog posts but more expensive media, like video. We cover video and films in a later chapter but, as an example, here’s what happens when you let habits take over your video marketing plan.

Talk Less. Smile More

In the hit musical Hamilton, the character Aaron Burr talks to a young and naïve Alexander Hamilton about how to win by making great relationships, as opposed to simply deluging the audience with speeches and constant arguments. Talk is all very well but a smile can open doors that words may never budge. As a filmmaker, I used to get requests from clients to simply turn up with a film crew to shoot interviews with senior executives. A long series of questions would be prepared to ask the VP of Whogivesashit in an office complex somewhere deep within an industrial estate in North Dallas.

When clients ask for a short video they often seem to feel that just because we see a senior person speaking the words, those words become magically imbued with the capacity to make people sit up and listen – that somehow their customers are waiting by the phone wishing someone would talk to them about that next special thing/approach/technology.

Guess what. Nobody cares.

Sorry to burst the bubble but they really don’t care. To get noticed, let alone followed, you’ve got to be imaginative with the programme making. Video and film are great at getting people to feel something, so why do we rely on it so much as a carrier of basic information? So many managers just point and shoot, collate the data (the words) and hope for the best.

What can we do to fix this?

1. Connect it to a need: Make sure that you have an idea that solves a problem for a customer; removes some pain; addresses a real issue – not one you think they have. Avoid solutions looking for problems.
2. Act like a journalist: Find a compelling story. Dig up that wow moment. If it’s a neat solution, discuss the “reveal” of that light-bulb moment.
3. Make it memorable: Find a metaphor or a creative environment you can leverage to get cool visuals. Avoid beige offices. (Note: You still need a story…)
4. Make it intimate: Stop making executives learn stuff and regurgitate it in front of the camera. Have them get passionate about the solution.
5. Have a plan: Instead of simply hoovering up everything you can think of during a shoot, concentrate on really nailing that compelling argument. Stop listing everything you can think of just because you can’t decide on which is the USP. That’s like buying everything in the store because you can’t decide on what to have for dinner. It’s expensive and distracts you from the key message.
6. So, my point is – make fewer films. Save the budgets to make better films. Concentrate budgets on creating breakaway successes and not dull, contractually obliged “stuff”.