Oh Look, The Marketing Silos Are Back
So, way back (machine) when Amazon only sold books, HTML backgrounds were all gray, and lightyears before the <blink> tag, agencies were raking in cash with massive retainers from print and television ads. Little shops like mine were considered interesting novelties, sidelined by the big players.
MEMORY LANE —
I used to call website design the “caboose factor.” Picture this: I’d be in a room (agency name excluded), listening to the creative director wax poetic about the fortunes we’d make from media planning, PR impressions defying common math, and excessive markups on all services. “Oh, and by the way, Justice, we got your team 10k for a website!” All aboard! I’ll be in the caboose. I joked that one day, the “interactive department” would lead efforts in “multimedia.” Yes, I know—I felt more hair turn gray as I wrote that.
<swirly Scooby-Doo-like montage of clocks spinning, time turning, and something akin to a tornado of Kai’s tools, Y2K, 100 WYSIWYG HTML editing tools, people being employed to FTP files, Adobe Flash, Social MyLinks, iPhones, CSS, and vertical composition>
Justice falls out of the time machine, now sporting tattoos, a 16-year-old daughter, a wonderful wife who hasn’t unplugged the time machine halfway through the session, and sciatica. God, I wish that was the name of my metal band that made me famous! But I digress.
Chat Bee-Gees-Tee-Teez? Huh? What’s going on!? It looks entirely different and yet oddly the same. Blink, and you come back to where we’re still planting our flags in service silos. It’s not right or wrong, just the cyclical nature of how we market to audiences using the best tackle (fishing metaphor inserted) at the time. Plus, the Gollum-like attitude we have when it comes to touching “my precious” might be your ticking time bomb of a business model or your unwillingness to accept that everything is one reply-all away from being obliterated by an overseas cyber hack.
Look, it’s incredibly difficult, near impossible, to cohesively coalesce a full-campaign plan with all your talent under one roof. Having a person in-seat, remote or otherwise, is not feasible for every facet of a real-time modern marketing campaign. Though, I’d imagine it like a giant Mission Control room where everyone smokes cigarettes, has mustaches—even the women—pinches their temples when there are GA4 delays, and jumps up victoriously to hug each other every time their post gets a share.
So how do we call, ride, and accurately optimize this Dune-like worm of confusion?
THE FAST LANE —
More than ever, you prepare.
We’ve lost sight of the importance of things like:
All new business, current, and retention is B2C—you are crafting persuasion to people, not a black obelisk named “business, education, brand, or service.”
Business objectives:
Primary, secondary, tertiary, and a made-up word that rhymes after that.
A progressive ramp-up of marketing design, scheduling, and deployment.
Understanding that a campaign is an ecosystem, not a punch list.
Pre, during, and post-success on micro-goals.
A worst-case scenario (zombies) and, thereby, a crisis plan.
Long-term forecasting is progressively tested in real-time so you don’t steer the campaign into the jagged rocks of trending opinions only to be sucked up by the revision scope creepers that live in them thar’ hills.
Marketing has become (yet again) an impulsive medium of assumptive services, allocating money toward service silos like feeding a baby bird with a Costco-sized t-shirt Gatling gun.
Again, there’s a comfort level in that room filled with executive account directors making a “duplicate” of previous campaign structures and doing a find-and-replace with the client name. This going through the motions is the reason you’ve not done a:
Define Objectives: Clearly outline the campaign's goals and what success looks like.
Competitive analysis: When did Waffle House’s menu get so small?
Identify Target Audience: Understand and segment the audience based on demographics, behavior, and needs. This is your mother, telling you to go make friends.
Market Research: Gather data on market trends, competitors, and consumer insights. Squirrel — meet nut.
Develop a Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Determine what makes the product or service stand out. Often USPs and key differentiators come from the competitive analysis. What are they doing, not doing, or should be doing.
Create a Budget: Allocate resources and set a budget for the campaign. Don't let budget curtail great ideation. Always work it forward and then retrofit the costs.
Choose Marketing Channels: Decide on the best channels (social media, email, SEO, PPC, etc.) to reach the target audience. The world right now, wants (and needs) a steady stream of care and feeding of education. What the generalized consumer may not make up in product knowledge, they will make up for by dropping you from the consideration set if they feel they're being sold.
Develop a Content Plan: Outline the type of content to be created, including key messages and themes. I once heard someone say, each channel's content should be specific to the channel. That's shortsighted as we all feed 'in the moment' on the given channel and audience assumption is the death of a LOT of creative.
Scheduling, Expectations, and Timelines: Establish a campaign schedule with key milestones and deadlines, all backed by a team of quick thinkers of the SHTF.
Design Creative Assets: Develop visuals, videos, and other creative materials needed for the campaign. You know – clipart!
Qualitative/quantitative analysis: It’s like a Cola challenge that you might enjoy. Eh, probably not.
Reporting: Determine the metrics and tools for tracking the campaign’s performance. The future is forever going to judge the likes of shops that will seek to accrue, and optimize against qualitative and quantitative data. This is your key to client retention and success.
Understanding “the thing” and the “audience” simply buying and using the product or service! It doesn’t mean it’s worth caring about just because they pay you to sell it. Remember the time that Peter Jackson set up a forums community a year before taking on ANY of the Lord of the Rings movies to entrench himself within the orgy of options about what a trilogy movie franchise [might] look like? No? Well, it happened.
“Yes, yes, but when can we use terms like ‘integrated algorithmic AI content management systems automated augmentationary deep learning architecture’ in our retainer?! We’re trademarking the name Red Scorpion right now!” You can start using it not to make plastic content but to level silos, prepare an ecosystem of thought, and work common functions into an overall plan.
When it’s all said and done, you’re not going to hire a person to click the “next button” on a PowerPoint slide—that’s for government contracts! But you will stop treating marketing, regardless of size, like a ‘one size fits all’; see next page ‘rinse and repeat.’
YOU'VE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION —
Let’s face it: the days of this marketing style are dead—we just don’t know it yet, nor have anyone planned for it. Clients and consumers alike can smell a cookie-cutter campaign from a mile away, and they’re not biting. They want authenticity, innovation, and, dare I say “sizzle,” just kidding, more like a bit of sriracha on their BH. The challenge is to make each campaign unique, tailored, and fresh—like a gourmet meal rather than a drive-thru vegan space-paste burger.
