What I want everyone to focus , from the small businesses that don't have the capacity to the big one to go back and focus on quality .
Welcome to the latest episode of marketers of the universe . We are here today to discuss two topics . Firstly , we're gonna dive into some of the trends and innovations that we see coming up . We are gonna try our best not to talk about AI , to try and keep things fresh , but you never know .
We're also looking at how to strike a balance between getting things perfect and getting things done when it comes to marketing and great campaigns . Additionally , we have any slight change to our episode releases . From here on , we will be releasing two episodes per month with two topics per episode , instead of one a month with four .
We're extending topic talk time so that you get a little bit more detail , but we will , of course , make sure that we give you actionable takeaways . So , without any further ado , let's get on with the podcast Cool . Our first topic today is Trends and innovations in marketing that are not AI and are not content focused .
We in the past in this podcast , have spoken a lot about AI . We've spoken a lot about content being super important in your digital marketing mix , but we want to dig into what else you need to be focusing on , what else you need to get right , what else is changing and Exciting and coming up on the panel today .
We have our paid media manager , michele Raffaele , and we have our head of digital marketing services , rich Harker , joining us Kicking things off . We have heard a lot about AI this year , but , as I said a minute ago , I want us to look beyond that , or Both of you and I'm gonna start with you , rich .
What are the two trends and innovations that you think Are really important right now ?
I'm gonna start with social media . So , looking at those social media channels that are less popular At the moment , meta , or Facebook , is still the number one social platform in the world . It has about 2.9 billion active monthly users , followed by YouTube and Instagram , and what's that surprisingly makes up the top five .
So there's still a lot of other social media channels that have Good-sized audiences , and we think of the likes of TikTok and Snapchat , pinterest . Focus on those channels . You don't need to necessarily be on those big guys because that is where the biggest audience are .
Think about those other channels when they're a little bit more niche and a little bit more creative and potentially a little bit more engaging . So I know we're not talking about content , but platforms . Focus not necessarily on on the most popular . Focus on some of those less popular platforms with your targeting .
There are so many social media platforms out there and that's before you even get into what a social media platform is . How do you know which one to choose ?
We talk about this a lot on the podcast . It's about identifying your audience and If you're doing your audience research correctly , you should know where they are currently Consuming their content or where they are hanging out the most . You know , look at the stats for each channel . Tiktok , we know , is predominantly a young audience .
It's something like 78% are aged between 13 and 34 . So , straight away , if you're targeting an older demographic , perhaps TikTok is not the right fit for you . However , people are consuming content in lots of different ways .
So I think it's it's about going back to that ideal customer profile and ensuring that you're doing your market research correctly and targeting them where their attention is .
I like to think about the words community when I think about finding those kind of social media channels . Michele , do you got anything to add to what Richard said ?
I agree with what he said . I always try to find practical examples to explain to our clients on how to choose the right platform . I do the example of all the fly-in advertisement .
If you have to give away flyers about your product and you are selling recline chairs , you don't go outside a gym , but you want to go places where you find your targeted audience . And the same concept as is yet is this can be applied on the social platform .
Is there any kind of up and coming channels that you both see that people should be paying attention to .
The last one was Thread that came out supposed to replace Twitter or X . I want to safely say that for 2024 we will stick with the standard most used platform . There's nothing coming up , but for this year we should stick to the four main that Rich mentioned before .
I'm going to say something that might be contentious , especially with Tom from the previous podcast , but I was doing some analysis recently , mainly just internet-based research , but we'll be surprised to know that X , formerly Twitter , is still one of the best social media channels for ROI .
There's a question there of where those stats have come from , but we won't dig into that now , because I do need to ask Michele what his leading trend in innovation is .
Or me , whether it's well Melio from the paid side . It's an old trend which is still surfing , which is the user-generated content . With all these new AI pictures generated in seconds , with these new phones that change the reality where you are , you can take a picture and the story file , remove all the people and assume that you are there alone .
All this type of content is going to be recognizable quite soon . So going back and having original content generated by user , that's the trend that we want to follow .
I'm a big fan of user-generated content . I'm not going to be pedantic and say that content was in the title about not looking at because I really like user-generated content , but I'm getting one of the kickbacks . I get quite a lot of clients that I'd like to tackle is how do you encourage your users or audience to create content for you ?
If you have a physical product that you can show , you can ask your community to share a picture of that product . In a way , you could wait for them to appreciate it and not only share it , and then you can collect it with all the hashtag references in all those posts . We tested it with Sports Nutrition Company in the past some contest .
So we have the launch of specific product and we encourage the first user to just try this product and repost it , sharing it .
Or there are some type of competition where you publish your UGC and , depending on how many people like or share that picture , you create an internal contest giving away some product or some discount , and that will force these UGC to come naturally and in a high volume in short time .
I agree with McKaylee , but also I think it stems from your brand .
If you establish a cool brand and a cool tone of voice I'm thinking surreal , serial in the way that they execute their stuff fairly creatively you almost are creating that viral content for people to go away and play with and share , and then with the rising content creators across most of social media , if you give them a nugget , they will go away and do the
rest for you .
Rich , another trend and innovation , please .
For me , I see a growing importance of brand over product and again let's touch on Surreal . There it's about building brand awareness rather than pushing serial . They have a serial product . They could focus on the fact that it's high in protein and they could talk about product features , but they're not .
They're establishing a brand and quite a playful , fun , creative brand . And for me , this year especially , I see more companies trying to grow their brand and leveraging brands to drive product rather than driving products first .
I'm going to push back on Surreal . Obviously , we discussed them a few podcast episodes ago and now they are not out with my LinkedIn feed . Seeing their cinnamon cereal . I took a wander down to Sainsbury's . You know one of those kind of midday .
Today's lunch is going to be cereal , because that's what I'm feeling Went to the cereal aisle , looked at how much it cost to pay for a box of cereal and I just went and bought a pack of those cinnamon grams , or whatever they're called them now , which I ate . All of them felt like crap .
So branding their drove sales to Nestle Michele anything to add to that .
I'd be very brief . I can only agree with Rich For many reasons . Main one is that is right If we want to add another very recent type of campaign that , instead of focusing on the product , is going about the brand . You must have seen it Is the Tesco one . Tesco is everywhere , from radio to cinemas to TV , online .
Of course , what they're promoting and spending quite a lot of money , in my opinion , on this ad is not about they are cheaper than Aldi or they are better than Sassbury .
They are just advertising their children's program , how much money they invested in something which is not straightly related to their product , but it's about their brand and how they help back all the communities . So this shift from the product to back to the brand , that's the other trend that we want to see more .
Finally , just to wrap things up , Michele , your second trend and innovation , please .
The fact that the only thing that AI can't create is a trend . You can't go on any artificial intelligence asking how do I make my post viral or how do I set and create a new trend . That's something , so in every one of us it's a random that makes it so special , so don't try to create a trend with AI .
The other thing that I'd like to see more and I would love all the big platform Google First to reward is the quality content back . We all know now that in a second , I can create you hundreds of articles .
Great , and what I want everyone to focus , from the small businesses that don't have the capacity to the big one , to go back and focus on quality over quantity .
Quality out of quantity Great . Can you add to that Rich ?
No , I think that has to be something that we all kind of take into consideration . I know this feature wasn't about AI as a trend , but the fact that AI is trending and is becoming very popular is essentially flooding an already overflowing pot of crap content that's being generated online .
I completely agree with Michele Stop focusing on volume and pushing stuff out and start focusing on quality . And here's another stack and this came from a webinar I was on recently with Neil Patel 90% of web pages indexed on Google receive zero traffic from Google .
Just goes to show you that 90% of your efforts in building lots of blogs and content is generating you absolutely zero .
On to our final topic Aim for perfect or aim for progress , and the importance of QA in marketing , and how you balance high quality end product with being flexible and fast . And with us on the panel today , we have Kieran O'Neill , Mark Bundle and we also have Nassir Naseira , who is one of our paid media managers . Let's kick things off .
I want us to get into debating this a little bit , because there are different ideas . I'm a business offering a tech SaaS product . I've just finished putting my new digital marketing campaign together and a need to launch it by the end of the week because Q3 is coming up . I don't have time to double check everything . We're tight on deadlines . What is better ?
Situation A I launch it . It goes on time , but I notice afterwards there were a few minor mistakes no spelling mistakes , maybe a few small brand guideline infractions . I can see Mark going already . Or B I delay launching by a week . I aim everything out and I launch a campaign that is perfect . What's better ? What's better ?
C , launching it on time , but then there's minor mistakes . A brand guideline infraction is not a minor mistake . Anyway , my C , my take , would be proper planning . You can use your team to proofread the copy first , before it even goes on anywhere . Write it in a document and get someone to proofread it .
Simple Ensure your designers are adhering to the brand guidelines . You have the right creative content , or creative content basically , that which means that your designers know exactly what to do with regards to getting it to work within your brand guidelines . You can crunch that . You can delay by 24 hours , maybe 48 .
I don't think I've ever worked in any marketing team that allowed a campaign to be delayed for a week , apart from a spring 2020 Last Minute Breaks campaign , but I think the world was busy worrying about something else at that point .
Kieran's knocked an ale on the head . The scenario itself is flawed . If you've got a campaign coming up , give yourself the proper time to get it properly . Get your spelling mistakes fixed . Maybe the computer does it for you . For the love of God , make sure you're hitting your brand guidelines .
Make sure you're doing things properly and give yourself what we're saying earlier on . Give yourself enough time to do that . If you rushed it all out at the last minute , you've already made the mistake . I like this .
I like this . Nassia , what are you saying ?
I want it Hank Situation B Multi because especially in paid , where you're dealing with budget caps , bit levels , lang pages , creatives and copy , there's a lot of things that we would need to QA . Especially a paid campaign involves money , so the pressure can be overwhelming if you don't have a proper QA process that's balance yet quick in place .
And I agree with the both of you Proper planning . If it's really a rush campaign , prioritize first the budget and what is shown to the public , like your creatives and copy anything that can potentially jeopardize the image of the brand . I would say the backend stuff can be done after .
If it's a really , really rush campaign , I mean that's a good point as well . Things last forever on the internet , so you've got to get them right first time as well , because people are going to see it , people are going to pick up on it . Even if you delete your social post and immediately fix it , someone has screen shot it . That will bad .
You either do , or forever . At least socially you can undo it . If you send an email with the wrong subject line or with a typo in , you can't fix that . If your website has the wrong offer and you've got an offer , you've got to comply and me that offer , even if it's God awful .
Yeah , things last forever now and people are so fast to pick up on mistakes . You can't afford to be that sloppy anymore .
Is there ? Maybe this topic isn't about QA and being perfect or being quick . Is this actually about planning better ? And is this about not cracking on the pressure of needing to turn around a campaign of any kind of ilk in a week , giving yourself the proper time ?
Yeah , we should be doing .
The start of every single year is , you know , sitting down with you got commercial team depends on size , obviously , of the company that you work for , but if you have commercials or a commercial team , you want to be sitting down with them and understanding the kind of the cadence of last year in terms of where were your peaks , where were the lows .
You figure out your shoulder periods , you figure out when you're big profit season , basically , and then you build in your marketing strategy , will have campaigns for all of that , and so what you need to be doing is , when you have those drops in revenue or demand or what have you depending on , you know what you're selling . There's a plan and it's also not .
Oh my God , this is horrific . We've got this huge hole that we need to fill . It's just like we're seeing a little bit of a drop here . We know what to do and so , yeah , you're right , this is now becoming more than just QA . This is becoming more about strategy , almost , but it's plan , plan , plan . You know there's timelines .
If you're looking about individual campaigns , you know you work backwards from the launch day to work out if it's achievable . There's no rushing , which is basically what Mark was talking about .
And if you know not and there is a demand for it and a need to get this done at X date what can be done to streamline , to design or the campaign setup or the campaign itself . Like , maybe we don't need to do direct mail , maybe we don't need to have print in general , maybe it just becomes digital instead , because it streamlines the whole campaign process .
It means you're not waiting for printers , or you know , as Mark was talking about and you yourself mentioned when stuff was written matters more as well . I know we mentioned that we shouldn't . Everything should be relatively perfect when it goes out .
But you know you can , not with email , obviously , but with social media you can publish some things and just edit it a bit later . Basically , but ideally these things should not be happening because the user experience is the priority .
I'm going to go very quickly to to Nasha about paid on this , because I know there was a slight difference in there . Maybe paid has a few more intricacies with regards to the fact that you can you need to be constantly replanning and restratigizing , so do you have any tips for making sure that paid is going well , Nasha ?
What has helped me in the QA process and launching campaigns ? In my experience , I would say just having at least one or two sets of eyes to help you . And you know the QA has experience in the field . It's really important to have a QA person who knows the ins and outs of building and executing campaign .
A bonus of the person is already familiar with the account , especially when you have multiple campaigns running at the same time , like hundreds of campaigns . Try to make use of tasks management tools . For me and the paid team use Monday and in the past I've used Asana . Same thing . It's good to have everything in place in one dashboard .
Another tip is to block your calendar out and dedicate at least an hour of your day for QA . Mistakes can happen here and there , but practice makes perfect . The more you QA , the more confidence you build and the more sharp you are at noticing slip up .
But one thing to note do have a preset checklist in place because when it comes to paid , there's a lot of technical aspects of it and at the same time , the process shouldn't be too extensive , because if you have a gazillion lists , it becomes a burden that unnecessarily delays launches .
There's a balance there from the sounds of it . I want to continue that conversation a little bit just around planning for QA and not just having QA as a shit . We need to have you QA this , no , but actually making a planning process or QA . How can a team go away and do that ?
Needs to be built into the workflow , same as there is . Get images designed . Make sure landing made is live . Make sure it's all been checked by a second pair of eyes Previous company didn't know what you're doing . Two pairs of eyes on it . You're loading new data into the system . Get someone to look at it with you . You're sending out a new email .
Somebody else had to proof it as well as yourself and it meant that every stage , everything was checked and , as a result , the accuracy rate was something like 99.5% . Obviously , odd things still does go wrong , but the chances are absolutely minimal .
And appreciate yes , sometimes I love we're saying that you need to plan in time and sometimes you'll get like a , a dictate come down from a manager guy . We need this thing out right now . But that's been like Kira said earlier and you can have cookie cutter stuff . Make sure you've got like an editorial schedule for the year .
So you've got oh , these are the topics we're covering , these are the big world holidays like Earth Day or International Women's Day or Black History Month or something like that . So you can kind of you've got these standard things in your back pocket that you can pull out quickly and then , because you've already QA'd that cookie cutter process .
You can just knock that out of the door really fast . You might have changed up where QA sits in the workflow , so you've got things prepared if you need to do something rapid .
I think this is such an interesting point . I hate the saying devil's advocate because it's just usually an excuse for being a dig , but Mark's is really bloody busy , aren't they Like ?
Whether it's true or not is maybe not the right thing , but you know it feels like you're always fighting against the clock and I know from conversations I've had with people in fast moving consumer goods and industries like that if you've got to get the things out of the door constantly , how do you balance that with building a process , like should you just like
slow down ? Like how do I do that ?
It's that's the thing is someone's mentioned it before , I think probably two or three times already but it's quality over quantity . And again , you know perfect and quick can be had . But I'm going to say it again plan . If you have a plan , you can get that perfect balance . Because you're prepared , you're already working at things You're already building .
You know your Christmas strategy or campaigns in summer , for instance , because you're working ahead so much . The last minute stuff is your cookie cutter . That is the stuff that you just go ahead and do . But you need to have a process that works .
You need to have a great relationship with the team and , for the love of God , you need to properly bloody brief the damn stuff . If you brief things properly , oh good Lord . Everyone understands the image dimensions they need to work towards .
Everyone has the right copy , everyone has the right URLs , everyone understands the channels that they're going in , which means that the teams are engaged at an early stage . All of that stuff happens Alongside understanding your brand guidelines inside it . Now , because , being a bit of a cheeky bastard myself , it's all about bending them rather than breaking them .
You bend them , you create a diverse range of campaign material , gives people creative freedom . It's almost like you look at marketing . Marketing can feel quite restrictive sometimes , but actually it's not . Imagine create the sandbox which is your brand guidelines , sit within it and then just dance around the whole sandbox .
And as long as you've got structure , process , briefing , good relationship with your team , it should all come together . You should get the perfect and quick , everyone's eager , everyone's keen , everyone knows what they're doing and everyone is helping . Proof whether it's the brand guidelines proofing or it's copy proofing .
I love all this People listening , love all this , but in reality and I've been on these teams where you're sitting in a marketing team where you don't even know what's going out next week it happens . It's stressful , we know it happens For those people .
What can we say to those people so that they can find time to make this planning process , to put into place something that allows them the time to QA , to future plan ? Mark , I'm going to make you add this up for me , if that's all right .
I'll say two things . In template , it's allowed for speed and quality , and you can pre-do your QA for a lot of it . Another thing is don't be afraid to say no Just because you're told this needs to go out . Does it ? Does it really ? We've said this before as well .
Think about what your customers want , not what your boss wants , just because they want to tell them about this great new feature . Why do the clients care If that means you are taking extra week and you know what ? We can plan this out properly . You can start slowing that wheel down , but doing it right .
Your customers are going to care , and when your customers are going to engage more , they're going to spend more and you get more time to do it properly . So you're more fulfilled as well . It's a win all around .
That is all we have time for today . Thank you everyone for listening in . Hopefully there's been a few bits of useful information in there and that there's something that you can go away Implement your own marketing strategy , implement your processes and hopefully help you be a better marketer . We love that you listen to this podcast .
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Do go and check out past episodes , subscribe on whatever platform you listen to your podcasts on , and we will see you on the next one . I've been Hayden and these guys are the marketers of the Unidos .