Are you stuck in the tactic trap?
Basing your marketing plan on past tactical successes seems logical, but it's a slippery slope. One day, you're patting your team on the back for a bold solution, and the next, you’re stuck in rinse-and-repeat mode – clinging to last year’s marketing plan like a security blanket.
Say your last social media campaign crushed it, and awareness soared. So naturally, you double down next time. And so on. Before you know it, you’re stuck in a recycling loop where you lose sight of the plethora of fresh opportunities that might be out there.
Relying on a proven tactic might seem like a safe bet: not always. In many cases it’s a formula for diminishing returns and missed opportunities, especially as your organization’s challenges change and audiences shift over time.
A hammer works great if your problem is actually a nail.
But what if it’s not?
The old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra works for a lot of things, but marketing ain’t one of them.
Focusing on tactics first is like trying to solve every problem with a hammer. Works great if your problem is actually a nail, but what if it’s not? Maybe you need a screwdriver. Or a blowtorch. At Show and Tell, we believe in taking a step back and cracking open the whole toolbox – taking the time to figure out what’s going to get the job done best. Even if it ends up being the hammer after all.
We get it, everyone wants quick answers. But who’s asking the right questions?
Brace yourself: the most effective marketing teams don’t just do exactly what you ask them to. They ask why. That’s because we need to understand the issue you’re trying to solve before launching into solutions. By starting with strategy, we dig deeper to uncover insights that open doors you might not have known were there.
Here’s an example: a new client engaged us to improve their media deployment. Their creative? Solid, they said. But they felt their reach wasn’t cutting it because they weren’t making enough progress towards their goal.
Instead of jumping straight to media tactics, like they asked, we hit pause and did some digging. We conducted research (you already know where this is going) that proved their reach and awareness was just fine. The message? Not so much. It didn’t make people care.
Even better, our findings revealed fresh audience insights that reframed the whole problem. And pointed toward the solution. Leveraging the new perspective from the strategy team, our creative and marketing experts crafted a new campaign that delivered the client’s most successful year-over-year result ever.
We could have simply executed their request, serving up our services like items on a restaurant menu. But by pushing for the client to consider new ingredients, we cooked up an opportunity they didn’t even know was there, and the result was *chef’s kiss*.
Integrated for the win.
This kind of success isn’t a fluke – it’s the result of integration. Bringing together experts from different disciplines and departments to address a challenge is what sets us apart.
Imagine an organization is struggling with brand perception. Solutions could range from a PR campaign to a full rebrand, depending on the nuances. No one department has all the answers, but by starting with strategy and combining insights from PR, creative, digital, etc., we can figure out what is likely to work best, and how to execute it.
A collaborative approach in the early stages of projects also helps us see how all marketing and communications efforts work together. For example, when our creative and digital teams motivate audiences to make a purchase, our development team ensures that the point-of-sale experience closes the loop with an intuitive and functional landing page.
That’s what integration is all about. And it’s had huge impacts on who we are as an agency.
It pushes everyone here to learn about each other’s roles, to always think of our efforts as part of a larger marketing organism. It pushes us to grow. It makes our digital marketers highly creative, our creative team exceptionally strategic, and our accounts folks truly intuitive about all types of tactics. All this fuels better and better work.
Ready to break out of the tactics trap?
If you’re tired of hammering away at the same problem and want to uncover fresh solutions, we’d love to help. Our collaborative, integrated team is ready to roll up our sleeves. Ready to chat? We’ll bring our toolbox.