that’s why this podcast got started, actually, was because we wanted to humanize the brand. We’re a research company, so people interacted with us with a website, maybe a salesperson, and we wanted to be like, “There are a bunch of folks back here with brilliant minds and personalities and senses of humor, and we’d love for you to meet them and that to be your gateway, your doorway into the home of EMARKETER”
It works!
I get their emails with the person’s name as the sender, which I recognize from them being on the podcast—a spark of connection.
Infinite content + copycatting + channels everywhere
Is not an equation for connecting the dots—at least when it comes to people paying attention to your brand and messaging.
if you’re telling a different story in multiple places, they might as well just be different companies, completely different stories, because the consumers aren’t going to make the connection by themselves.
-Marcus Johnson
Brands are stories. Your marketing should be like Dickens serials, not Infinite Jest.
Connect the dots for your audience.
Consumers have incredible bs detectors.
So if you’re not being consistent with your story in multiple places, then they’re not going to believe you.
If you’re showing up and you’re telling me one thing and you’re behaving another way, even if it’s just a few times, it starts to erode that trust.
People don’t believe what you’re doing. Consumers will start to call you out.
Consistency is incredibly important.
What does this look like and feel like every time I’m interacting with my consumer, no matter how small the interaction is?
-Heidi Waldusky
Everything Is Billboards Now
Kieran Flanagan posted on LinkedIn:
SEO isn’t dying. It’s evolving into TV ads.
Everyone sees your Ad, and no one clicks it. AI assistants turn search into a billboard.
To which I added:
Getting a click or a sale isn’t the purpose of each individual ad or touchpoint. It’s about the aggregate impact.
Each exposure is a seed planted in the mind of the audience member. A field of flowers makes a bigger impact than a solitary bloom.
This can be an uncomfortable shift for performance marketers that have been mainlining real-time data and ROAS numbers for years. It’s harder to measure the impact of exposure and reach but we don’t want to stop at counting impressions or mistaking correlation for causation.
But I’ve been giving my Google Ads ecommerce team member a hard time for years that my social ads work with unimpressive ROAS numbers has been driving easy sales to his high performing channel. I put in the work, he reaps the glory. (It is a joke, but the best jokes are rooted in the truth (or complete absurdity, but that’s not relevant here).)
But now even a Google Search isn’t the obvious end point.
Our role as marketers is to tell a story across the channels we operate on for a brand to establish familiarity so that when a customer is about to make a decision we come to mind. Whether that happens via them actively seeking us out or anchoring on our name in a consideration set.
Make an impression. Provide value. Play the long game.