Stay Curious, My Friend

When designing or executing your digital strategy, it helps to be curious: study what other brands and businesses are doing; follow your competitors; utilize tools like Facebook's free Ad Library to learn and gain inspiration; learn about and implement best practices for your industry and marketing channels.

Communicating Pandemic Safe Practices to Your Customers

If you are a customer-facing business during these uncertain times of the pandemic, you must be communicating to your customers and clients what you are doing to keep them safe and how you are doing it. Here is a COVID-19 safety Safe Practices video I produced for McKenzie Dental. In 2-minutes, we cover their entire process, from welcoming patients at the door to social distancing during dental procedures. More than merely describing the process, we convey it visually with beautiful imagery and editing.

Congratulations to our client Dwell Well with Jess

Chasnoff Media would like to congratulate Jessica Brunt of Dwell Well with Jess, for being featured in April’s edition of Portland Monthly as one of Portland’s top realtors! Here’s a little 30-second video we did to celebrate her accomplishment and share the news with her clients.

Now is Not the Time to Backoff.

A timely and relevant op-ed piece by political strategists David Axelrod and David Plouffe.

On the surface, this article is about politics. But replace "Joe Biden" with "your business," and what you have is a playbook for what every company (especially small and medium-sized companies) need to be doing right now: namely, leaning into their digital marketing and sharing their stories. Now is not the time to back off. If you do, you risk obsolescence amid the flurry of activity by others to corner markets in the online space. "The challenger needs to behave more like an insurgent…" Turn the tables on your competitors by taking action and not sitting idly by to see how things pan out. Be creative. Expand your reach. Carefully craft your messaging and content. Create a strategy rather than just throwing posts against the digital wall.

Pairing Strategy with Creative content for Growth Marketing

Published April 7th, 2020 in the Portland Business Journal.

When you think of creative content, what comes to mind? Perhaps it’s photos, videos, or clever copy nestled within the margins of your favorite social media channel or newspaper.

However, I contend that creative content is about more than the final image or words on the screen or page. It’s just as much about ideation, production, distribution, and strategic execution—and integrating these elements into the creative process. By looking at creative content through a strategic lens, you will find that there is more to marketing and advertising than the artwork, copy, layout, and design.

Think strategy first

Before you leap into creative efforts, take a step back to consider a few strategic marketing questions:

• What is your product or service?

• What are your value propositions?

• Who is your target market and what problem is your product or service solving for them?

• What’s your call to action — what do you want members of your target market to do?

• What resources do you have to work with, from cash to in-house talent?

Your answers to these questions should inform every creative content decision you make moving forward.

Along with asking yourself these questions, I recommend having each member of your marketing and sales team answer these questions on his or her own and then discussing their answers together as a group. This is a powerful way to discover fresh ideas or reveal gaps in your organization’s strategic vision.

Set key performance indicators

From the very beginning of the strategic marketing process, you must set clear, simple, and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). These will enable you to accurately assess whether or not your creative content is hitting the mark across marketing channels.

Your KPIs will vary depending on which channels you use. Choose KPIs that are meaningful to your organization. If you don’t, you are simply collecting data that will guide you nowhere.

Some possibilities are:

• “Likes” on social media

• Positive reviews

• Return on ad spend (ROA)

• Cost per click (CPC)

• Cost per lead (CPL)

• Revenue

What you measure should always depend on what you’re trying to accomplish and how you intend to use the KPIs to strengthen your business.

Measure, analyze, and adjust

Strategic marketing is a long game and your approach to creative content needs to reflect that. You must resist the urge to push content to your channels simply to “get something up.” Having a big-picture creative content strategy and knowing what you want to accomplish will enable you to collect valuable data in real-time, measure it, evaluate it, and adjust your strategy based on the feedback from your audience.

By thinking in terms of long-term strategic campaigns, rather than individual posts, you get a 10,000-foot view of what’s happening, where you’re confronting obstacles, and how you can pivot.

Every KPI and data point is — quite literally — your customers telling you what they do or do not like. Listen to them. Use your audience’s response to inform your marketing and content decisions, rather than relying on internal office politics or your organization’s pre-existing biases.

Build your calendar
A simple way to organize and clearly communicate your creative content strategy to your internal teams is to develop a content calendar that plainly lays out each aspect of your campaign.

• Type of creative (video, photo, animation, etc.) being posted

• Launch date

• Channel

• Copy

• Call to action

• Relevant notes for those executing the campaign

By distributing this content calendar among the different people and departments that are involved in the sales or marketing of the product or service, you keep communication clear and acquire buy-in from key stakeholders. In addition, this simple tool helps keep everyone on a consistent schedule, clearly delineates responsibilities for success, provides accountability to team members, and defines an actionable approach for strategy execution.

Put strategy first

By now you’ve probably noticed that this article doesn’t offer tips on shooting video on your mobile phone or rules for the run-time of your social media videos. That’s because a successful creative content strategy is about more than the look of the final design. It’s also about the essential strategic questions every organization must ask in order to be successful.

Strategy is the partner of creative and they should be developed and designed in concert. If you can bring this approach to your organization’s creative content, you may just have something that people “like.”

Stages Indoor Cycling Product Video Launch

This week saw the wrap of a big project produced for Stages Indoor Cycling. After months of collaboration between Chasnoff Media and the Stages marketing, sales, and creative teams, we completed the new product video for their Solo indoor bike. The creative process included scripting the voice over, storyboarding, production on location at the Portland Bay Club, and post-production, where we were able to integrate some incredible footage shot by their marketing and sales teams from around the globe.

Teamwork. Idea-sharing. Adaptation. From the first rough cut to the final, this video took on a life of its own and organically evolved to both tell the Stages Indoor Cycling story and clearly promote the product. From the director’s perspective, I wanted to ensure that the video conveyed all of the key elements relevant to the product, which were essential from a marketing and sales perspective. However, I also wanted to communicate through the visuals, editing, and overall story, the company’s strong culture, brand value, and key differentiators. If you put this video side-by-side next to some of the competing brands, you’ll find that it communicates a different energy and grittiness.

Big thanks to the Stages marketing team and everyone involved. It’s always exhilarating working with all of you!

Creative Content for Strategic Growth Marketing – OEMBA Presentation Slides

Creative content is about more than the final image or words on the screen or page; it’s about ideation, production, distribution, and strategic execution. By looking at creative content through a strategic lens, we can recognize that there is more to marketing and advertising than the artwork, copy, layout, and design.

Thanks to everyone who joined us on the 19th at the University of Oregon Executive MBA in downtown Portland where I presented alongside Brianna Showells, VP of Marketing for Nike Swim and Nick Winkleblack, CMO at Ox Media on growth marketing strategies. I focused on content creation and provided actionable, hands-on tips and tricks. If you weren’t able to join or want to review the slides, you can download the presentation deck below. Questions? Contact me at gabe@chasnoffmedia.com.