On the 3rd of December 2022 (Tomorrow at the time of publishing), it will be 30 years since the first text message was sent. Now text messages seem so old news I only seem to get them for password verification or offers from my service provider.

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Lets just start by saying digital marketing is a great thing. Make no mistake it is the best thing to happen to marketing since….ever.

Why is that? Because data.

Live, reliable feedback on how people interact with your adverts.

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Marketing before:

Guessing how many people were watching a particular TV show at 6pm on Friday night and of those 20% saw your advert and of those 0.1% went to the supermarket the next day and bought your product. There are measures you can use but it will always be vague at best. Pop on a suit, print some big posters and sell the dream knowing there will never be any real way to precisely measure the impact.

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Digital marketing now:

Placing an advert directly in front of your target audience, seeing live how many of them interact with it and using cookies tracking that person from advert to online purchase. A full closed loop of purchasing behaviour with information that can show how to improve too.

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So what is the problem?

It is a huge and diverse industry. Digital Marketing refers to all forms of advertising and marketing communications that are delivered digitally. That could be emails, social media, google ads, text messages, metaverse and on, and on. Each of those forms of communication comes with its own opportunities and restrictions on content type. While a company will look to push out a consistent message the actual content creation task is huge. Images, video even copy are re-formatted endlessly to suit the various platforms. Then if that wasn’t enough, some of these adverts are dynamic so there can be several layers of if statements and sub-content.

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And what is the solution?

Here is the blindingly obvious dirty little secret that so few people are talking about: nothing has changed. Yes, there are now far more marketing channels than that used to be. But the question at the core of all good marketing hasn’t changed one bit.

Who are we targeting? Where will we reach them?

If you consistently apply this rigour to your marketing efforts, the myriad of available channels will shrink to a list of useful, powerful tools to reach your audience.

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The TrueGroup approach.

Every project we undertake at Truegroup starts with those simple questions. Even when we are responding to a prescribed brief from a client, we will challenge ourselves (and sometimes them) to ensure that this campaign will reach their audience. Of course there are a few more stages so lets pour the secret sauce all over the table and do a high level run through for you right now:

1. Who are we targeting? Some client’s will be really clear, others may need help here in which case its worth starting with a mini sprint nailing this down.
2. Where can we reach them in a meaningful way. This is a little harder as of course there can be lots of touch points and it takes research and data to work it out (so hire us to do it for you!). What we try to do is start with a big list dumped down and then work back through that and place them in order of priority and perceived impact. Acknowledge that we might not get it perfect first time, the data will guide us on what worked so remain agile and keep questioning this list once the campaign is live.
3. Against each outlet, list the type of content best suited to it. 9 times in 10 that generally involves a mix of video and imagery.
4. Now to improve the project ROI. Don’t go and commission all of the relevant content in separate stages but rather spend a minute working out how a single piece might be able to feed all of those avenues. For example, a single day full studio shoot might yield the core campaign video, but if you work smart it can probably give you Behind The Scenes content, stills and if scripted carefully, a video that can be cut down into smaller chunks too. Segmented storytelling will enable you to use pieces of this to flesh out the content dissemination. The same is true by the way for our VFX team who can still give you stills and small parts of the story which hugely boosts the effective output from the same budget.
5. Schedule and deploy the content and look at interactions. This is a hard part to master but at this stage you need to do two things which can contradict each other. The first is to give it enough time to sink in. Our research and experience shows that it can take 6 months of a campaign before you see real traction. On the other hand be ready to iterate and fail fast. If something is quite clearly not hitting the mark re-focus the budgets so you are doing what works.

So its easy after all.

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Of course, the delivery of this simple plan takes skill, creativity and experience. The volume of work can also be mighty; for example, just a simple Charles Stanley campaign that we delivered recently had fourteen different aspect ratios and six different messages for a single dynamic adverts campaign. Yes that is eighty four outputs for just one short run campaign.

So the best delivery system is often a lead agency to act as guardian of the message and campaign. This is a role we often take on for clients acting as a skilled representative particularly in innovation and Web3 projects. Then a small team of specialists who understand specific niche requirements and can maximise the exposure there. Roughly speaking, that lead team will be storytellers and content creators. The specialists are then technical delivery partners to help optimise each verticle.

A key second benefit of this approach is protecting continuity across your marketing platforms. The core content can feed different formats, which will improve the ROI of their development.

If you want to know more about anything in this article please don't hesitate to reach out, my details are below.