While there has been a lot written about this, just thought of sharing the 9 key tenets that I follow – .
1. Always have a call to action (CTA):As Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of marketing is to create a customer.” If you don’t include an CTA, all you are doing is creating more awareness instead of more customers. Make the call to action clear and direct.
2. Create a sense of urgency. Its “NOW” or “Never”: With all the noise and overload of information and adding the every decreasing attention span, your customer is either going to act “now” or never. We need to keep the sense of urgency in our marketing initiatives, a reason to act “NOW”. Typical examples are putting a time limit or limited quantity offer. Grab the attention of the people who see your ads and give them a reason to act right now.
3. Don’t Assume, be clear on what you want the customer to do :Don’t assume people will know what to do when they see your marketing material. Tell them exactly what step you want them to take next.
4. Right Channel, right format, Right device: While we all know that the ad needs to serve Right Message at the Right Time to the Right Person. It is imperative that this is delivered via the right channel using the right format designed for the device.
5. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize: If you’re not testing and tweaking your marketing continuously, it will not be as effective as it could be. Test and Track / measure while being agile in optimizing should be core to any campaign. In fact, if it can’t be tracked and measured – its better not doing it.
6. Content is and always will be the king: Focus on writing in a way that sells – focus on strong content (copy). More and more ads today (digital) are made of nice pictures and catch phrases, but do they garner the response you looking for? If yes, great. But more often than not, the right content (along with pics and phrases) will lead to a better conversion (keeping the point 1 2 & 3 mentioned above)
7. Frugality: We all know this as one of the Amazon leadership principle – Being Frugal – Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. A frugal mind towards your campaign will go a long way
8. Consistency: Consistency across your campaigns should be a mandate. While this is critical to a marketing ad or campaign, this is also to do with your “brand strategy”
9. There is nothing called as an awareness campaign: It doesn’t matter what the objective of the campaign is, there is always a desired result and call to action. stay away from vanity metrics and as a marketer, y listen and act only on results.
