This viral picture reminded me of a couple of things.
First, that creativity (coming up with ideas) and innovation (the implementation of those same ideas) can be applied to anything, even something as old as business cards.
And second, that creativity and innovation are often a good way to create early stages buzz. Whether that will spread further down the line, though, is a different matter.
You can’t have it all.
It’s a sentence we often hear and one that is incredibly difficult to live by.
Of course, when you think, act, are as if that were true, the single thing that’s left is to understand what is important. Remove the distractions and the infinite opportunities, get them out of the way.
You can’t have it all means you can still have some. The trick is ensuring the “some” is highly relevant.
Customer communication is an opportunity to establish and strengthen a relationship. Not just a way to deflect a possible inquiry.
You should know (and tell) whether a package has been delivered or not. And if it has, spare the customer the clutter in their inbox.
You could add the link to track the delivery. And spare the customer the trouble to dig into their incoming messages to find it.
You could suggest a direct way to ask a question. And spare the customer the time to go through the website, the help section, the knowledge base articles, and the feedback form.
Good customer communication often goes unnoticed, because it makes the experiences smooth and does not impose additional tasks on the receiver.
It’s not impossible, and can be achieved with some intention.
It’s a responsibility as marketers to make marketing accessible to the rest of the organization. We are the ones good at communicating, after all.
It starts with reporting on your KPIs.
If you have 20 slides with tables filled with character size 12 numbers, covering all the regions, all the channels, all the assets, all the stages of the funnel, you are doing everybody a disservice. Nobody will understand what you are up, and by not understanding it, they will not be excited about the next thing you will present or ask money for.
Pick three numbers. Make them about awareness, conversion, and pipeline. Report on them with three slides, splashing the big number on one side and an explanation of the number on the other (what you did, what happened, why it matters, what’s next – keep it character size 30 at least). Do it every month or every quarter and let readers ask their own questions about regions, channels, assets, and so on.
That’s a way to build credibility and interest around the marketing function.
There are different ways to share learnings and insights.
Many keep them for themselves, at most sharing with a close circle. They see learnings and insights as an advantage in a competitive environment, and they leverage them to achieve status.
Some share them all around, perhaps doing some sort of selection based on interest. They typically do that once and then assume that everyone is in the loop and will act accordingly.
A few manage them, ensuring they are properly discussed, distributed, and acted upon. They take the time to understand who can benefit from them, they organize a space to exchange opinions, they put together the right context to do some testing, they track results that inevitably lead to further learnings and insights – starting the loop once more.
Of course, this last approach is ideal. But you can’t follow that with everything. That’s why it matters to know what is important.
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