How To Think About Marketing As A Creative
Bold statement time: The only purpose of content or any marketing you do as a creative should be this: get their attention.
I said it. Attention is the only thing we’re trading as marketers.
Not likes, shares, IG story views…
It’s always astonishing to me to hear that such and such is a “Youtuber” or an “IG person”…
What are you talking about? These people are in business, these are just channels for them (you?) to make money.
Here is how to think about marketing for creatives in this noisy world:
Marketing is pick and mix
Ok let me ask you ask you this:
If you were looking for a plumber in London, how would you find one?
Here is my guest of what you would do:
- Google it,
- Look at the map for someone not too far,
- Check out a few of them and compare price and service,
- Then call/book one.
So if you’re a plumber in London. Do you need an Instagram account?
NOPE! (sorry GaryVee).
Also in this example if you’re the plumber: no one cares about your blog articles, your YouTube videos, Facebook Live…
People want to use your service as a professional plumber not learn how to fix the sink themselves…
I mean do you know how entitled I am? Me? Fixing stuff around the house?
So his free content is not valuable. Instead the plumbers in London should focus his effort on getting at the top of the search results for example (SEO, PPC).
My point is, marketing is not about looking for the shiniest new object or social media and go all in on it.
It’s about what works for you.
So email marketing still works, SEO works, Magazine ads, even radio ads can work!
But this is 2019!
These days you hear phony marketer say: you HAVE to be on Instagram, you NEED a YouTube channel…
A website? This is 2019, who looks at websites?
This is an inaccurate way of thinking about marketing and business.
Again, all you’re trying to do is getting people’s attention.
If your audience is on Instagram, then yes you should have an account and share content.
But this can only be a part of your strategy, the top of the funnel.
The end result has to be to send them to a place where they will pull out their credit card. Most of the time that’s your website.
Social and YouTube are just places where you share great content and enter the person’s ecosystem. You may need to do it to be relevant in a lot of markets.
But understand that the goal is to get them to buy and for that you have to bridge the gap between social and the shopping cart.
How to bridge the gap between social and shopping cart
It’s all about context. That’s also why email marketing is so powerful… still!
People scrolling down on social or YouTube are not there to buy something. They want to see memes, vlog, entertainment… They’re basically looking to escape. Which is fine. Just be aware of that.
Your objective is then to get them somewhere they’ll likely buy something from you. Again, most likely, that’s your website.
When they land on your website you only have a small window of time. In 2019, think about how many website you to go regularly to just browse around…
This is why you need to get their email address. But people are not going to give it away that easily.
You’ve read this far so let me give you an actionable tactic to implement for this:
The best way to do that is by having a popup and giving a valuable piece of content away (“ethical bribe”) in exchange of their email address. This doesn’t have to be intrusive.
Ideally, they get to your website because you gave them a reason to: free content, something to check out… Remember this is what your social and, everything at the top of the marketing funnel (see image further above), mainly aims to do.
Once you got their email, that’s another channel to go back to the website, let them know about an offer, share valuable stuff… You get the picture.
So pick and mix your marketing channel and craft something that works for you! Talk soon…