Z3 Project 2022 Marketing and Promo Video

Part 3 of the video marketing campaign created for the December 2022 Z3 Project conference in Palo Alto, CA. The strategy, which we designed during the pre-production phase, hit three major milestones ramping up to the December event:
• a re-cap of the previous event
• a save-the-date reminder for the upcoming conference
• a call-to-action for ticket sales

What's the takeaway? Your marketing and sales strategy should be integrated into your video production from the onset. Don't wait until you have the content to begin thinking about how your business will use it. Of course, stay flexible, be willing to adapt to changing market demands and customer needs, and remember that the magic happens in the editing room where anything becomes possible.

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.”

Finding Opportunity in Times of Crisis

With numerous production projects on hold due to the current state of affairs, I have, admittedly, been more immersed in Netflix than usual. However, some motivational gems have appeared amid the hours of television consumption. The most poignant for me, at this given time, is a line of dialogue repeated throughout Narcos: Mexico, spoken by Angel Felix Gallardo, played by the very talented actor Diego Luna: “In crisis, there’s opportunity.”

So now, when so many businesses are struggling to survive—pivoting, contracting, or justifiably hitting the pause button on operations—where can you look for opportunities amid the COVID-19 crisis? How can you recognize opportunities when everything feels so bleak?

Assess

With business ops slowing down or coming to a pause, this could be a great time to assess your business from the inside out and ask pertinent questions:

• Has the current crisis revealed any gaps – both in your business or in your industry? Is there an opportunity to fill those gaps to create a strategic competitive advantage moving forward?

• Has the crisis provided you with any opportunities or new insights on how to innovate, change your business model, or otherwise strengthen your position (even if strengthen, at this moment in time, simply means surviving)?

• What are your company’s points of differentiation and value propositions? If every business like yours is being impacted in the same way by this crisis, is there anything that you can do differently to increase your chances of survival?

• Now, with a couple weeks of hindsight since the beginning of the crisis, is there anything your business could have done better to prepare for such uncertainty?

• Has this crisis revealed any leaders in your firm (or weak links)?

• What has the crisis revealed about your own character? Is there anything you’d like to bolster or change?

Catch-Up

The pace of my business, and certainly my life in general, has slowed significantly in light of the COVID crisis and orders to shelter in place. This has provided me with the opportunity to catch-up and do a lot of the things I didn’t have the time, energy, or focus to do before.

• Strategize. Now is a great time to review your firm’s strategic plans, and if you do not have strategic plans in place, to begin formulating them. I have been collaborating with numerous businesses to help devise their digital marketing strategies, video strategies, and social media strategies.

• Create. Write those blog posts you’ve been putting off. Record those videos you’ve been avoiding. Outline your social media content calendar so that the next three months are ready to go.

• Communicate. Re-connect with the people in your life – those in your personal and professional life.

• Update. Now is a great time to update that aging website, refresh the images and branding elements across your digital channels, and refresh the old templates you’ve been using for a decade.

Reflect

Times of crisis always present an opportunity to reflect, check-in, and change.

• Are there trade-offs that your company (or you, personally) need to make? Creating an impactful strategy and a successful business means making choices – both what to do and what not to do.

• Do the different components of your business ‘fit’ together? Are there any weak links? Did any of those weak links make your business more vulnerable to the current crisis? Perhaps your portfolio of clients was not diversified enough, or your revenue was overly dependent on a single client.

• If your business disappeared, are there other things in your life that bring you joy? If you could no longer go into work, what else would you do? How would you fill your time?

As much as we try to prepare for the unknown and shelter ourselves from turmoil, we will continue to face crises of all varieties. However, by confronting these crises head-on and taking the time to understand their implications, perhaps you can find the hidden opportunities that lie tucked away in the folds of chaos. Don’t forget: “In crisis, there’s opportunity.”

Need help with your firm’s strategy? Want guidance on how to accomplish these goals? We’d love to work with 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.