Know your audience and be relevant to them
Creativity, design, copywriting and production values are meaningless – unless they all come together in a communication that’s relevant to the audience or consumer: emotionally and rationally. It’s not complicated, the best conversations are with people who you find interesting and marketing communcations are no different. Except an advertisement, social post, TV commercial or email needs to identify with the audience’s field of interest and achieve relevance in an incredibly short space of time. All you’ve got as the cognitive process kicks in is half a second to prove you’re worth engaging with.
So, if your strategy hasn’t a detailed consumer profile at it’s core we need to fix that first before we get ‘creative’.
What have you got to say that’s relevant?
Well, let’s prove your relevance first and make sure we do it in as impactful and unique way as possible…in half a second. And that’s not going to happen if you’re plagerising the competition (or your advertising agency is!). Nor is it going to work if you’re using generic stock imagery, borrowed interest to trick the audience into engagement, being too clever, or, your message is just plain boring and generic. Effective marketing communication is simple, it efficently embeds itself into the audience’s psyche and creates emotonal and rational trigger points.
Accurate research, distinctive design, compelling copywriting and great production values are relevant.