Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

Beyond AI: Unravelling top marketing trends and the timeliness vs. quality conundrum

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 9

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AI is the taboo word of the week as we try very hard to discuss marketing trends that don't involve the current tech craze. This means returning to basics with selecting the right social channels for your message, and understanding your audience. The bread and butter, if you will.

The team is also discussing quality assurance in campaigns, and questioning whether it's better to launch on time or launch perfectly. Where should compromises be made, or have you already failed if you're having to weigh up those options? Listen to find out!

We're also thrilled to announce a minor change to Marketers of the Universe that will provide you with more insights, more frequently! We're altering the podcast to focus on two topics instead of four, and will be releasing fortnightly instead of monthly. This means we have more time to delve into each topic, and ensure we can uncover the best tips for you to utilise in your own marketing strategy.

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Michele Raffaelli:

What I want everyone to focus, from the small businesses that don't have the capacity to the big one to go back and focus on quality.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Welcome to the latest episode of marketers of the universe. We are here today to discuss two topics. Firstly, we're gonna dive into some of the trends and innovations that we see coming up. We are gonna try our best not to talk about AI, to try and keep things fresh, but you never know. We're also looking at how to strike a balance between getting things perfect and getting things done when it comes to marketing and great campaigns. Additionally, we have any slight change to our episode releases. From here on, we will be releasing two episodes per month with two topics per episode, instead of one a month with four. We're extending topic talk time so that you get a little bit more detail, but we will, of course, make sure that we give you actionable takeaways. So, without any further ado, let's get on with the podcast Cool. Our first topic today is Trends and innovations in marketing that are not AI and are not content focused.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

We in the past in this podcast, have spoken a lot about AI. We've spoken a lot about content being super important in your digital marketing mix, but we want to dig into what else you need to be focusing on, what else you need to get right, what else is changing and Exciting and coming up on the panel today. We have our paid media manager, michele Raffaele, and we have our head of digital marketing services, rich Harker, joining us Kicking things off. We have heard a lot about AI this year, but, as I said a minute ago, I want us to look beyond that, or Both of you and I'm gonna start with you, rich. What are the two trends and innovations that you think Are really important right now?

Rich Harper:

I'm gonna start with social media. So, looking at those social media channels that are less popular At the moment, meta, or Facebook, is still the number one social platform in the world. It has about 2.9 billion active monthly users, followed by YouTube and Instagram, and what's that surprisingly makes up the top five. So there's still a lot of other social media channels that have Good-sized audiences, and we think of the likes of TikTok and Snapchat, pinterest. Focus on those channels. You don't need to necessarily be on those big guys because that is where the biggest audience are. Think about those other channels when they're a little bit more niche and a little bit more creative and potentially a little bit more engaging. So I know we're not talking about content, but platforms. Focus not necessarily on on the most popular. Focus on some of those less popular platforms with your targeting.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

There are so many social media platforms out there and that's before you even get into what a social media platform is. How do you know which one to choose?

Rich Harper:

We talk about this a lot on the podcast. It's about identifying your audience and If you're doing your audience research correctly, you should know where they are currently Consuming their content or where they are hanging out the most. You know, look at the stats for each channel. Tiktok, we know, is predominantly a young audience. It's something like 78% are aged between 13 and 34. So, straight away, if you're targeting an older demographic, perhaps TikTok is not the right fit for you. However, people are consuming content in lots of different ways. So I think it's it's about going back to that ideal customer profile and ensuring that you're doing your market research correctly and targeting them where their attention is.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I like to think about the words community when I think about finding those kind of social media channels. Michele, do you got anything to add to what Richard said?

Michele Raffaelli:

I agree with what he said. I always try to find practical examples to explain to our clients on how to choose the right platform. I do the example of all the fly-in advertisement. If you have to give away flyers about your product and you are selling recline chairs, you don't go outside a gym, but you want to go places where you find your targeted audience. And the same concept as is yet is this can be applied on the social platform.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Is there any kind of up and coming channels that you both see that people should be paying attention to.

Michele Raffaelli:

The last one was Thread that came out supposed to replace Twitter or X. I want to safely say that for 2024 we will stick with the standard most used platform. There's nothing coming up, but for this year we should stick to the four main that Rich mentioned before.

Rich Harper:

I'm going to say something that might be contentious, especially with Tom from the previous podcast, but I was doing some analysis recently, mainly just internet-based research, but we'll be surprised to know that X, formerly Twitter, is still one of the best social media channels for ROI.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

There's a question there of where those stats have come from, but we won't dig into that now, because I do need to ask Michele what his leading trend in innovation is.

Michele Raffaelli:

Or me, whether it's well Melio from the paid side. It's an old trend which is still surfing, which is the user-generated content. With all these new AI pictures generated in seconds, with these new phones that change the reality where you are, you can take a picture and the story file, remove all the people and assume that you are there alone. All this type of content is going to be recognizable quite soon. So going back and having original content generated by user, that's the trend that we want to follow.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I'm a big fan of user-generated content. I'm not going to be pedantic and say that content was in the title about not looking at because I really like user-generated content, but I'm getting one of the kickbacks. I get quite a lot of clients that I'd like to tackle is how do you encourage your users or audience to create content for you?

Michele Raffaelli:

If you have a physical product that you can show, you can ask your community to share a picture of that product. In a way, you could wait for them to appreciate it and not only share it, and then you can collect it with all the hashtag references in all those posts. We tested it with Sports Nutrition Company in the past some contest. So we have the launch of specific product and we encourage the first user to just try this product and repost it, sharing it. Or there are some type of competition where you publish your UGC and, depending on how many people like or share that picture, you create an internal contest giving away some product or some discount, and that will force these UGC to come naturally and in a high volume in short time.

Rich Harper:

I agree with McKaylee, but also I think it stems from your brand. If you establish a cool brand and a cool tone of voice I'm thinking surreal, serial in the way that they execute their stuff fairly creatively you almost are creating that viral content for people to go away and play with and share, and then with the rising content creators across most of social media, if you give them a nugget, they will go away and do the rest for you.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Rich, another trend and innovation, please.

Rich Harper:

For me, I see a growing importance of brand over product and again let's touch on Surreal. There it's about building brand awareness rather than pushing serial. They have a serial product. They could focus on the fact that it's high in protein and they could talk about product features, but they're not. They're establishing a brand and quite a playful, fun, creative brand. And for me, this year especially, I see more companies trying to grow their brand and leveraging brands to drive product rather than driving products first.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I'm going to push back on Surreal. Obviously, we discussed them a few podcast episodes ago and now they are not out with my LinkedIn feed. Seeing their cinnamon cereal. I took a wander down to Sainsbury's. You know one of those kind of midday. Today's lunch is going to be cereal, because that's what I'm feeling Went to the cereal aisle, looked at how much it cost to pay for a box of cereal and I just went and bought a pack of those cinnamon grams, or whatever they're called them now, which I ate. All of them felt like crap. So branding their drove sales to Nestle Michele anything to add to that.

Michele Raffaelli:

I'd be very brief. I can only agree with Rich For many reasons. Main one is that is right If we want to add another very recent type of campaign that, instead of focusing on the product, is going about the brand. You must have seen it Is the Tesco one. Tesco is everywhere, from radio to cinemas to TV, online. Of course, what they're promoting and spending quite a lot of money, in my opinion, on this ad is not about they are cheaper than Aldi or they are better than Sassbury. They are just advertising their children's program, how much money they invested in something which is not straightly related to their product, but it's about their brand and how they help back all the communities. So this shift from the product to back to the brand, that's the other trend that we want to see more.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Finally, just to wrap things up, Michele, your second trend and innovation, please.

Michele Raffaelli:

The fact that the only thing that AI can't create is a trend. You can't go on any artificial intelligence asking how do I make my post viral or how do I set and create a new trend. That's something, so in every one of us it's a random that makes it so special, so don't try to create a trend with AI. The other thing that I'd like to see more and I would love all the big platform Google First to reward is the quality content back. We all know now that in a second, I can create you hundreds of articles. Great, and what I want everyone to focus, from the small businesses that don't have the capacity to the big one, to go back and focus on quality over quantity.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Quality out of quantity Great. Can you add to that Rich?

Rich Harper:

No, I think that has to be something that we all kind of take into consideration. I know this feature wasn't about AI as a trend, but the fact that AI is trending and is becoming very popular is essentially flooding an already overflowing pot of crap content that's being generated online. I completely agree with Michele Stop focusing on volume and pushing stuff out and start focusing on quality. And here's another stack and this came from a webinar I was on recently with Neil Patel 90% of web pages indexed on Google receive zero traffic from Google. Just goes to show you that 90% of your efforts in building lots of blogs and content is generating you absolutely zero.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

On to our final topic Aim for perfect or aim for progress, and the importance of QA in marketing, and how you balance high quality end product with being flexible and fast. And with us on the panel today, we have Kieran O'Neill, Mark Bundle and we also have Nassir Naseira, who is one of our paid media managers. Let's kick things off. I want us to get into debating this a little bit, because there are different ideas. I'm a business offering a tech SaaS product. I've just finished putting my new digital marketing campaign together and a need to launch it by the end of the week because Q3 is coming up. I don't have time to double check everything. We're tight on deadlines. What is better? Situation A I launch it. It goes on time, but I notice afterwards there were a few minor mistakes no spelling mistakes, maybe a few small brand guideline infractions. I can see Mark going already. Or B I delay launching by a week. I aim everything out and I launch a campaign that is perfect. What's better? What's better?

Ciaran O'Neill:

C, launching it on time, but then there's minor mistakes. A brand guideline infraction is not a minor mistake. Anyway, my C, my take, would be proper planning. You can use your team to proofread the copy first, before it even goes on anywhere. Write it in a document and get someone to proofread it. Simple Ensure your designers are adhering to the brand guidelines. You have the right creative content, or creative content basically, that which means that your designers know exactly what to do with regards to getting it to work within your brand guidelines. You can crunch that. You can delay by 24 hours, maybe 48. I don't think I've ever worked in any marketing team that allowed a campaign to be delayed for a week, apart from a spring 2020 Last Minute Breaks campaign, but I think the world was busy worrying about something else at that point.

Mark Bundle :

Kieran's knocked an ale on the head. The scenario itself is flawed. If you've got a campaign coming up, give yourself the proper time to get it properly. Get your spelling mistakes fixed. Maybe the computer does it for you. For the love of God, make sure you're hitting your brand guidelines. Make sure you're doing things properly and give yourself what we're saying earlier on. Give yourself enough time to do that. If you rushed it all out at the last minute, you've already made the mistake. I like this.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I like this. Nassia, what are you saying?

Nasya Nasseira:

I want it Hank Situation B Multi because especially in paid, where you're dealing with budget caps, bit levels, lang pages, creatives and copy, there's a lot of things that we would need to QA. Especially a paid campaign involves money, so the pressure can be overwhelming if you don't have a proper QA process that's balance yet quick in place. And I agree with the both of you Proper planning. If it's really a rush campaign, prioritize first the budget and what is shown to the public, like your creatives and copy anything that can potentially jeopardize the image of the brand. I would say the backend stuff can be done after.

Mark Bundle :

If it's a really, really rush campaign, I mean that's a good point as well. Things last forever on the internet, so you've got to get them right first time as well, because people are going to see it, people are going to pick up on it. Even if you delete your social post and immediately fix it, someone has screen shot it. That will bad. You either do, or forever. At least socially you can undo it. If you send an email with the wrong subject line or with a typo in, you can't fix that. If your website has the wrong offer and you've got an offer, you've got to comply and me that offer, even if it's God awful. Yeah, things last forever now and people are so fast to pick up on mistakes. You can't afford to be that sloppy anymore.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Is there? Maybe this topic isn't about QA and being perfect or being quick. Is this actually about planning better? And is this about not cracking on the pressure of needing to turn around a campaign of any kind of ilk in a week, giving yourself the proper time?

Ciaran O'Neill:

Yeah, we should be doing. The start of every single year is, you know, sitting down with you got commercial team depends on size, obviously, of the company that you work for, but if you have commercials or a commercial team, you want to be sitting down with them and understanding the kind of the cadence of last year in terms of where were your peaks, where were the lows. You figure out your shoulder periods, you figure out when you're big profit season, basically, and then you build in your marketing strategy, will have campaigns for all of that, and so what you need to be doing is, when you have those drops in revenue or demand or what have you depending on, you know what you're selling. There's a plan and it's also not. Oh my God, this is horrific. We've got this huge hole that we need to fill. It's just like we're seeing a little bit of a drop here. We know what to do and so, yeah, you're right, this is now becoming more than just QA. This is becoming more about strategy, almost, but it's plan, plan, plan. You know there's timelines.

Ciaran O'Neill:

If you're looking about individual campaigns, you know you work backwards from the launch day to work out if it's achievable. There's no rushing, which is basically what Mark was talking about. And if you know not and there is a demand for it and a need to get this done at X date what can be done to streamline, to design or the campaign setup or the campaign itself. Like, maybe we don't need to do direct mail, maybe we don't need to have print in general, maybe it just becomes digital instead, because it streamlines the whole campaign process. It means you're not waiting for printers, or you know, as Mark was talking about and you yourself mentioned when stuff was written matters more as well. I know we mentioned that we shouldn't. Everything should be relatively perfect when it goes out. But you know you can, not with email, obviously, but with social media you can publish some things and just edit it a bit later. Basically, but ideally these things should not be happening because the user experience is the priority.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I'm going to go very quickly to to Nasha about paid on this, because I know there was a slight difference in there. Maybe paid has a few more intricacies with regards to the fact that you can you need to be constantly replanning and restratigizing, so do you have any tips for making sure that paid is going well, Nasha?

Nasya Nasseira:

What has helped me in the QA process and launching campaigns? In my experience, I would say just having at least one or two sets of eyes to help you. And you know the QA has experience in the field. It's really important to have a QA person who knows the ins and outs of building and executing campaign. A bonus of the person is already familiar with the account, especially when you have multiple campaigns running at the same time, like hundreds of campaigns.

Nasya Nasseira:

Try to make use of tasks management tools. For me and the paid team use Monday and in the past I've used Asana. Same thing. It's good to have everything in place in one dashboard. Another tip is to block your calendar out and dedicate at least an hour of your day for QA. Mistakes can happen here and there, but practice makes perfect. The more you QA, the more confidence you build and the more sharp you are at noticing slip up. But one thing to note do have a preset checklist in place because when it comes to paid, there's a lot of technical aspects of it and at the same time, the process shouldn't be too extensive, because if you have a gazillion lists, it becomes a burden that unnecessarily delays launches.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

There's a balance there from the sounds of it. I want to continue that conversation a little bit just around planning for QA and not just having QA as a shit. We need to have you QA this, no, but actually making a planning process or QA. How can a team go away and do that?

Mark Bundle :

Needs to be built into the workflow, same as there is. Get images designed. Make sure landing made is live. Make sure it's all been checked by a second pair of eyes Previous company didn't know what you're doing. Two pairs of eyes on it. You're loading new data into the system. Get someone to look at it with you. You're sending out a new email. Somebody else had to proof it as well as yourself and it meant that every stage, everything was checked and, as a result, the accuracy rate was something like 99.5%. Obviously, odd things still does go wrong, but the chances are absolutely minimal.

Mark Bundle :

And appreciate yes, sometimes I love we're saying that you need to plan in time and sometimes you'll get like a, a dictate come down from a manager guy. We need this thing out right now. But that's been like Kira said earlier and you can have cookie cutter stuff. Make sure you've got like an editorial schedule for the year. So you've got oh, these are the topics we're covering, these are the big world holidays like Earth Day or International Women's Day or Black History Month or something like that. So you can kind of you've got these standard things in your back pocket that you can pull out quickly and then, because you've already QA'd that cookie cutter process. You can just knock that out of the door really fast. You might have changed up where QA sits in the workflow, so you've got things prepared if you need to do something rapid.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I think this is such an interesting point. I hate the saying devil's advocate because it's just usually an excuse for being a dig, but Mark's is really bloody busy, aren't they Like? Whether it's true or not is maybe not the right thing, but you know it feels like you're always fighting against the clock and I know from conversations I've had with people in fast moving consumer goods and industries like that if you've got to get the things out of the door constantly, how do you balance that with building a process, like should you just like slow down? Like how do I do that?

Ciaran O'Neill:

It's that's the thing is someone's mentioned it before, I think probably two or three times already but it's quality over quantity. And again, you know perfect and quick can be had. But I'm going to say it again plan. If you have a plan, you can get that perfect balance. Because you're prepared, you're already working at things You're already building. You know your Christmas strategy or campaigns in summer, for instance, because you're working ahead so much.

Ciaran O'Neill:

The last minute stuff is your cookie cutter. That is the stuff that you just go ahead and do. But you need to have a process that works. You need to have a great relationship with the team and, for the love of God, you need to properly bloody brief the damn stuff. If you brief things properly, oh good Lord. Everyone understands the image dimensions they need to work towards. Everyone has the right copy, everyone has the right URLs, everyone understands the channels that they're going in, which means that the teams are engaged at an early stage. All of that stuff happens Alongside understanding your brand guidelines inside it.

Ciaran O'Neill:

Now, because, being a bit of a cheeky bastard myself, it's all about bending them rather than breaking them. You bend them, you create a diverse range of campaign material, gives people creative freedom. It's almost like you look at marketing. Marketing can feel quite restrictive sometimes, but actually it's not. Imagine create the sandbox which is your brand guidelines, sit within it and then just dance around the whole sandbox. And as long as you've got structure, process, briefing, good relationship with your team, it should all come together. You should get the perfect and quick, everyone's eager, everyone's keen, everyone knows what they're doing and everyone is helping. Proof whether it's the brand guidelines proofing or it's copy proofing.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I love all this People listening, love all this, but in reality and I've been on these teams where you're sitting in a marketing team where you don't even know what's going out next week it happens. It's stressful, we know it happens For those people. What can we say to those people so that they can find time to make this planning process, to put into place something that allows them the time to QA, to future plan? Mark, I'm going to make you add this up for me, if that's all right.

Mark Bundle :

I'll say two things. In template, it's allowed for speed and quality, and you can pre-do your QA for a lot of it. Another thing is don't be afraid to say no Just because you're told this needs to go out. Does it? Does it really? We've said this before as well. Think about what your customers want, not what your boss wants, just because they want to tell them about this great new feature. Why do the clients care If that means you are taking extra week and you know what? We can plan this out properly. You can start slowing that wheel down, but doing it right. Your customers are going to care, and when your customers are going to engage more, they're going to spend more and you get more time to do it properly. So you're more fulfilled as well. It's a win all around.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That is all we have time for today. Thank you everyone for listening in. Hopefully there's been a few bits of useful information in there and that there's something that you can go away Implement your own marketing strategy, implement your processes and hopefully help you be a better marketer. We love that you listen to this podcast. We love making this content and we really love it if you could recommend the show to one friend that you think would enjoy listening. If that's a colleague, an ex-colleague, share it on LinkedIn. We'll appreciate it, and thank you in particular to the British Digital team for their research and input into today's session. Do go and check out past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you listen to your podcasts on, and we will see you on the next one. I've been Hayden and these guys are the marketers of the Unidos.