You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Trend and Strategy Alignment?

In today's episode, Yulia asks, How will you know if a marketing trend is right for your business or brand or whether you should stay clear of it? This is a good question because there's obviously always lots of new things to try out, lots of new things to explore, new social networks, new uh tactics, new strategies. And the answer to this question is relatively straightforward. There's a framework that uh Bob Stone came up with, I think it was Bob Stone, 1968. Was it that?

Um, for direct marketing called list offer creative, right? And it uh back then it was do you have the right list for direct mail? Do you have the right offer to put in front of the customer? And do you have the right creative, meaning the actual p uh mail piece itself? And if there's a lack of alignment in those uh any of those components, the campaigns that you put out simply won't work.

We can repurpose uh Stone's framework for this with an additional piece, uh, which is values. So when you're looking at any new application, for example, or a new technology, uh the first thing you have to ask yourself is does it resonate with your audience? And you have to do some research. Um if you don't already have a focus group of some kind of your audience, it's time to get one. Um something like a Slack group or a Discord server would be ideal, uh, or a uh handful of people that you can just email uh or text or whatever within reason any time and say, hey, have you heard of this thing?

Uh are you aware of it? Uh things like that. Uh for an example, go over to uh trust insights.ai/slash analytics for marketers. You'll see our uh analytics for marketers Slack group. And I'll ask people questions all the time in there, like have you heard of this thing?

What's your take on it? So audience. Is your audience there? Um and you can find that out by asking them. Second, does whatever the trend that we're talking about fit your values?

Um there will be some places where yeah, your audience may be there, but it may not be appropriate for your brand. Uh, for example, uh, there's uh relatively new, like a couple years old, I think, uh, uh app called Parlor. Uh that is uh has a very, very specific viewpoint and has a whole bunch of people that endorse that viewpoint and it may not align with your brand. Um there is uh a new DSP that uh is a huge huge audience by Pornhub, right? Again, you may that your audience may be there, but do you want your brand to be advertising there?

That's a question for your values and whether uh you feel it's brand appropriate. The third uh thing is offers, uh, and that is do you have something to offer of value uh with this trend? Again, this is uh a very much an alignment thing. Uh going back to the the Pornhub example, um, people go to that site for a very specific reason and to see your B2B uh SaaS firewall appliance ad there, the offer is going to be misaligned with what the audience is seeking, right? That's a better thing for to advertise, say on you know uh PC magazine or network world uh as opposed to Pornhub.

And then the fourth thing is the creative. Do you have the capacity or capability to make the creative appropriate for that format? And this is a big uh one for uh apps like TikTok. Um can you publish creative that is in alignment with what that the format of that application is? For some brands and some marketing teams, that's super easy to do.

They have the right kind of culture, uh, the right kind of people, the right uh equipment and capabilities to publish uh really good TikTok um videos. Same for Instagram Reels. Other brands, they don't. Um they have not been able to crack the code on how do we publish content that meets the requirements of what the audience is looking for here. Um again, that company with that you know B2B firewall application, it's gonna be a hard it's not impossible.

There are plenty of brands that have done interesting creative, umatically appropriate creative, but it is harder to do that in an environment, say like TikTok than it is, say on LinkedIn, right? Um and again, a lot of that comes down to capacity too. Do you have someone on staff who is a good video editor? Um do you have somebody on staff who's good at audio? Uh if you don't, for example, making a good quality podcast is very difficult.

Your audience may be listening to podcasts, podcasts may be um a a value and ethically neutral medium, meaning there's no inherently challenging uh part of that. Uh you may have offers relevant to have on a podcast, but you don't have the creators who can uh record audio cleanly, edit it, process it, and prepare it for uh distribution. And so anytime we're evaluating any kind of marketing trend, we have to look at these four factors and how well our brand is aligned. Some of them are operational, some of them require a lot of research. And the more research you do on things like uh valid offers, uh, the type of creative creative you need, the type of creative that performs well, uh, who the audience is in as much detail as you can uh find, the better you will know whether a marketing trend is right for your business or brand.

How do you know when something should stay steer clear of something? Again, I would say if you're really, really bad at any one of these things, or there's a real substantial deficit in any one of these things, you know, audience values offers creative, and it's not something that you can patch up uh or build capacity or capability for, then you steer clear of it. You know, for example, if your audience just isn't there, wait, you know, if you're um if the the place you're looking at simply does not align with your values, uh it's probably not gonna change a whole lot. Um, so you uh either wait or just pass it by. If you can't find relevant offers, uh relevant things that would be important to the audience there, um you can experiment some for sure, but it's still gonna be an uphill slog.

And if you can't build the creative, you have to ask yourself are those capabilities things that we would need elsewhere in the organization? And if so, um is that need enough to justify the expense? Sometimes it will be, like I firmly believe that pretty much every organization should should have access to some video and audio capabilities, whether it's through an agency, whether it is through intern in-house talent, doesn't matter. Uh, you should have something that allows you to create good quality audio and video. Other things, like if you have someone who's just got a very specific niche and all they do is you know TikTok videos, that might not be as useful.

Um, but those would be the indicators to steer clear of uh really bad at any one thing, steer clear of it. Bad at two or more of the things, definitely steer clear because you're just not going to be able to make up that deficit. Um unless you unless for some reason you believe it's a strategic imperative. Um and that would be governed by your audience and values. If your audience is there and this and the the trend is aligned with your values, and you just don't have the offers and creative to do it, then yeah, if you are pretty sure you can make a go of it, then you would then you would invest heavily.

Understanding you might have negative ROI for quite some time until uh you can turn things around. But if say customer acquisition is the imperative and not ROI, that might be an okay strategic decision to make. So that's how to know whether a marketing trend is right for your business. Alignment to the four categories, and then no show stoppers in each of the four categories. Uh it's a good question, and it's an important one to think about.

Uh, if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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