This article was originally written for the Anti-Social Social Media Club Newsletter.
Harry Dunn woke up from his nap expecting to see the mountainous landscape up ahead, but instead, he was greeted by the flatness of the Nebraska countryside. He proclaimed to Lloyd behind the wheel of the 'sheepdog' they were driving, "Huh, I expected the Rocky Mountains to be a bit more rockier than this," to which Lloyd responded, "That John Denver is Full of Sh**, man."
To be blunt, that's kind of how I feel about all this "marketing strategy" being thrown around all day online at everyone and their brother who runs a company.
Do you know what I'm referring to when I write that? Have you experienced the so-called gauntlet of marketing experts telling you how to scale, how to share content, how to create a compelling hook, how to utilize AI, or my favorite one, some guy from [I think] Australia throwing his MacBook out of a car window as a metaphor for wasting your money on ads, as he yells at you about ROAS (go ahead and look it up, I'm not ashamed to admit that I had to)?
(By the way, if you're still with me after that run-on sentence, congratulations.)
These so-called professional agencies create content about how to create content and run ads about how to create ads, but the people they're selling to are not. They create content and run ads to sell a product or service, not to sell more ads. I mean, I'm no judge, but I would say the so-called professionals are "John Denver."
I'm of the era where I would much rather tell a compelling story and focus on the creative than the "hook" that grabs someone's attention. In the era of not including a call to action asking my audience to "click here" because I'm too afraid of letting them decide for themselves what to do when they're done digesting the ad, I just paid top dollar to interrupt their regularly scheduled program with.
That's the interesting thing about marketing tactics. The same is true for sales tactics; the good ones don't need to create a mirage of something or convince you to buy something you never thought you needed. Instead, they inspire you to take action because what they put out in the world was, for lack of a better word, just "Good."
No pressure, right? Just create something good; that's all, but no, seriously, if you put all of your efforts into all of the technicalities such as the hook, the cta, the format, the copy, they, the placement, the spend, the reach, the ideal client persona, you really do risk wasting valuable energy that could be invested into your creative ideas, which I feel compelled to say that you'll likely wake up someday with huge expectations, only to realize you need to "backtrack a tad!"
"A tad, Lloyd!!!!"
I consider myself a story-driven marketing agency. Below are a few of the stories I've written for myself. Just for the record, I warned you.
Thanks for hanging in there.
Derek
