BBB tips: The marketing tools marketers can't live without, how to cultivate a learning culture and choosing your external partner properly

It’s no secret, we love sharing the key insights from our breakfast roundtables. Here are the challenges shared from our last one:

Live by the 5 Why’s

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One person spoke about the importance of using the 5 why’s - an often forgotten exercise that is really useful when planning your content strategy. 

Why? 

Because it gets us to really question why someone would care about the content we are planning to produce.

Why?  

Because you’ll find insights and quirks that will help your content become more authentic and more ‘on-brand’

Why? 

Because this will help directly solve some of your comms challenges you’re facing with your audience

Why? 

Because you’ll stop creating content for content’s sake, or worse, content that isn’t achieving the results you want.

Why?

By implementing this process into every part of your marketing strategy you’ll be able to truly understand the core human motivation for the purpose of your content and why your audience is going to engage with it. 

You know what we mean?!

Test and learn, but don’t forget to give time to learning

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It’s great to see more companies integrate a “growth mindset” culture into their ways of working, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the content you produce. 

But one of our brand marketers confessed that while they test plenty and have weekly meetings to figure out what they’re trying next, they don’t truly allow for time to apply their learnings to it. It’s resulted in a cycle where things end up constantly being revised and sometimes making the same mistakes… 

One tip that was shared was to physically document your learnings all in one place and make it available for the whole team to access, essentially creating a publicly available wash-up deck (we’re huge fans of this and do this with each of our clients). But don’t write them just to forget about them the next day, re-visit them before you embark on a new project to remember what particular decisions might not always be wise. 

Another more collaborative and emotive version of this pitched to the table was to sit down with every team member involved (including your juniors!) and give each a voice on how they think the project fared.

Showcasing who your company is isn’t a crime

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A particular challenge that one marketer confessed is that while they may be good at talking about their products and services, they’re just not good at talking about themselves as a brand. 

As a result, some talk about their 1000 person company as if they’re ‘4 guys in a basement’. 

To truly solve this challenge, we discussed creating content that gives your stakeholders a voice, showcasing your team and champions your business for its practices not just its products. Of course there should be a balance but it’s no crime to show pride in the company you are a part of.

How to choose your external partners properly

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Of course we’ve all got horror stories about working with the wrong people and projects falling flat, so another topic that was discussed round our table (and a very interesting one as the only agency in the room!) was how marketing teams choose their external partners. 

A big tip was to trust your gut on whether the agency/partner you’re seeing would be a good cultural fit. Question their working process and especially quiz their buzzwords like “collaboration”  to find out what it tangibly looks like in reality.

Another marketer spoke about preferring partners who were honest and realistic about managing expectations as opposed to just being “yes men”. Understanding what can be achieved in given parameters is really important especially if you don’t have as much knowledge about the subject as the agency.  Having a partner interrogating your brief from an outsider’s perspective is healthy, as long as they can show they can provide plausible solutions…  

Dogs always win 

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And if all else fails, just shove a dog into your content… (in joke for those in attendance sorry all!)

Like what you’re reading and want to have your slice of the pie? Book a ticket to the next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie on March 11th. Only a couple of tickets left so book quick to eat a great breakfast and chat through everything going on right now.

Or, you can book yourself in for our new BONUS edition looking at the ins and outs of creating impactful video content on March 17th… 

Email sunnii@mattr.media if you’ve got any questions!

How to build a water-tight brief for you (and your agency partner!)

Writing a decent brief for both you and your agency partner is massively important. If done well, your brief should act as a touchstone for you both to create actionable instructions out of… it also ensures everyone is staying on course once the project is off the ground.

Trouble is, people aren’t really taught how to brief. So often important details can get left out and details that are supposedly set in stone change halfway through, leading to timely mistakes and costly errors.

This is definitely the case with video content, in spite of it probably being the most effective way to emotively connect with your audiences and educate them on why you exist.

Often video teams are often briefed at the “end” of planning phase… we’ve certainly felt this pain ourselves, and over the years have often had to rewrite briefs with the client to ensure the proposals we come up with are fit for purpose.

So, to save you time, stress and potentially money for when you’re putting your next video brief together, the below are some common details people leave out that are really important for your partners to understand:

1. Communicate your business challenge

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Often brands tell us the communication objective of their video project, but it’s even more important to understand what the underlying business problem is that has led to your decision to create this video.

One time we were asked to create a campaign for a client who needed to raise awareness with a new audience, but when we learnt that they also needed to drive sales once that audience landed on their website, the amount and type of content we delivered was reprioritised vs what we had been asked.

If we hadn’t have dug deep here, perhaps it wouldn’t have been as effective as it was.

2. Write down any relevant audience insights

Any audience insights you have to hand should be shared as part of the brief for the video.

Most briefs explain what the brand wants the audience to “know/feel/do” after watching the video, but it’s just as important to understand their mindset and what their painpoints are BEFORE they watch the video.

Frankly even if you don’t have large pools of research to hand, just informing the agency what these people love and worry about around your brand and the sector you work in is massively important to understand.

3. A deep dive into your budget

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No, this isn’t the point where you should say what budget you have, that should be a given.

However, you should also include information on what resource you have internally that could help with savings. This could be anything from team or customers who you could feature in the films, locations you could make available, team members who could support with anything during production or after.

Basically it’s worth putting down as that way the agency partner should be able to work out how to best spend the budget knowing all the tools they have at their disposal.

“TOP TIP: if the budgets allocated don’t match your ambitions, consider how you can look money together between your teams... ultimately if the content produced can help recruit new talent or sales teams use in meetings, they should contribute towards the project.”

4. Use the brief to think about how you can scale the campaign

What else are you doing beyond this video to drive the action you want? Are you creating supporting content for the viewer after they watch the video we are being asked to create? What about a landing page that stores some of that info you can drive traffic to and capture emails from? Is there a social competition being created to drive further engagement?

When we say we create “scalable” video this is how we think and often the client is thinking this way too, so let your agency partner know...it can spark new ideas and sometimes additional content that can be captured on set to support your plans.

5. Explain to your partner what types of internal resource are and aren’t available

Can't stop, won't stop, please stop

Following on from this, explain to your video partner what internal resource can support their work. Do you have in house pr or paid media taken care of? What about social community management? Graphic design? It’s great to know this can be leveraged and if you don’t your video partner should have its own decent network of partners they work with to help plug the gaps.

There are plenty of other elements to building out a brief. And whilst we can share briefing templates to help you with this, we also run complimentary briefing workshops to ensure absolutely nothing is missed out. If you’re interested in having one, just get in touch with josh@mattr.media

BBB tips: working on communications between teams, when to consider a re-brand, and how to create a genuinely engaged community

We’re back from another great instalment of Brand, Bitch & Brekkie, with plenty of fresh insights to share from the real-world challenges our community of purpose-led brands find themselves in.

Changing the mindset internally towards to your marketing team

We’ve touched on this briefly before in previous roundtables, but there is no one-size-fits-all answer to helping your internal teams work more efficiently together. But what we have noticed is that the usual tension lies between how each team is perceived in terms of the value they add (explored further in “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni).

An interesting method to resolving this, for one particular brand, was to have the marketing team sit in on sales meetings and vice versa. This helped ensure an understanding of what types of collateral were integral to guarantee sales and the loyalty of customers, and essentially drew a line in the sand to what shouldn’t be changed or branded as ‘not on brand’ - making sure all voices are heard.

Understanding the red flags that can help identify if you need to consider a re-brand

When you’re starting a business and your team is small, everyone knows each other, your brand and its values so intimately. But naturally, as you grow, new faces join the team and many of them won’t really know who you are or what you really stand for.

Several guests shared their experiences of why this was a problem: 

1. “If it’s not resonating with us, how are our customers going to understand it?” 

2. “I sat down with 10 different people, and nobody could tell me what we actually do” -

3. “OK they say, I get it you’re purpose-driven, but now what?” 

For a lot of the people around the table, it became necessary to go through a rebrand process with the aim of ensuring their values, tone of voice and general ways of working matched up with the vision they had for the company...interestingly the most successful of these processes was done extremely collaboratively with the whole team and became the benchmark to plan all communications out of.

Taking the steps to build a genuine community

Creating a genuinely engaged and involved community is something that many brands struggle with. It’s a tricky field to navigate and execute properly - as engaging each of your users/customers face-to-face is a big leap. But luckily, we had some fairly experienced guests round the table who could spill secrets on their success...

A great example of this from one of our guests round the table was through a closed Facebook community - but they take care to make sure the channel isn’t a free for all. The brand’s marketing team are admins, and the only ones who can post, but their audience can like and comment to their heart‘s content. These parameters essentially protect their digital community space from becoming another customer service channel, and also cultivate a very authentic channel to communicate to their community, when organising face to face meetings is next to impossible. 

Another brand told us of how they host monthly pub sessions for their brand ambassadors.  This brand prides itself on the fact that the ambassador roles are volunteered by their community, so as a reward and a way of getting insight to their guerrilla outreach, what could be better than going to the pub? They recommended this method as a way to boost your company culture and exchanging ideas straight from the eyes and ears of your brand’s community.

Be open about sharing everything, even if you think it isn’t a big deal 

But having the foundations for building a community isn’t enough - and one guest fought this argument with a pretty great idea. 

Using the digital medium above, they’ve actually benefited from their community being directly involved in their business decisions. As an example, they’ve collaborated on working files of brand guidelines and tone of voice documents, product initiatives and web designs, even down to the design and layout of a button on their app because of free flowing feedback. 

It’s been an adjustment to create an additional feedback round in all these processes, but it’s led to a huge amount of brand loyalty and investment in their brand. It’s a lesson to us all to be open about allowing your community to help make decisions that you might not consider important or be able to resolve internally.

AND we host a great roundtable breakfast for our community of purpose-led brand marketers: they’re small, intimate and exclusive - and works a treat to see your beautiful faces.

We’ve got our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie on Feb 11th, and there’s a couple of tickets left. 

Book yourself in here OR email sunnii@mattr.media to find out more!

Looking back over our f**k-ups of 2019 - what a year..

Why is it when we get to the the holiday season, most companies only talk about the things that have gone well that year? The road to your success is paved in mistakes and failure, so in spite of some amazing things that have happened, this article wants to do something more real and raw, focusing on our 4 biggest f*ck ups of the year and what we’ve learnt from them.

Our hope? Whether you’re a brand marketer or agency partner, the below will encourage you to share your own failures from this year. It’s these things that have ultimately got us all to where we are today.

Learn to say no by coming back to your mission

2019 has been challenging for many reasons and I am not shamed to admit, we have had some real tough moments this year. When times are tough, it becomes difficult to say no to things you would usually ignore. But the trouble with this more reactive attitude is if were to fast forward 5 years, you may end up with a company that differs from the vision you had when you started it.

Of course any brand journey requires some level of flexibility, but if like us you believe in brand purpose it’s critical to recognise when you’re slipping down this road. That’s why we’ve spent a lot of time recently checking back in with our values to ensure they are at the core of all the decisions we make, from the customers we work with, the team we hire, to the value we provide people beyond our services. We even have our own criteria checklist for jobs that come in, to act as a guide so that if times get tough again we are consciously making a decision, not just doing so because we feel we need to.

Make sure stakeholders feel a part of your project, not just people who green light it.

There have been a couple of projects this year with really drastic last minute requests. On reflection, it’s been because of a combination of being rushed into delivering a project for tight deadlines or because certain stakeholders were not informed about the creative route we had agreed to, until they actually saw the end product.

Drastic last minute changes can be painful for all involved- for the client it can lead to lengthy delays on delivery times, additional fees or worse. If the changes are impossible to make, then you’re in dangerous waters of producing an under-par campaign or even canning the whole project. And for your agency partner this situation is also really tough: agencies always want clients to be thrilled with their work, but there’s only so much one can do once everything has been filmed.

There’s nothing worse than thinking “if only we knew this in the briefing stage”. So ultimately we’ve learnt it’s absolutely critical to ensure all stakeholders have not just signed off on ideas but are actively involved too...

When agreeing on responsibilities, ensure people really understand the tasks they’re taking on

The nice thing about working so collaboratively with clients is a shared sense of responsibility when it comes to getting a project done, none more-so than when budgets are tight and we are all looking for ways to make savings. Often a way to do this is for clients to take up the mantle of organising talent, finding locations or even supplying props and wardrobe on the day.

Most of the time this strategy has worked to aplomb, but sometimes clients haven’t quite understood the resource required to carry out the work they’ve taken on. A good example of this is when we are looking for user generated content as part of the narrative. It’s really important to factor in the necessary time to source this internally because it usually takes longer than you expect to get customers (or even staff) to do things for you.

So, have an honest and frank chat with your agency partners about what’s entailed in the work you’re committing to before doing it, work out what gives you the best chance of completing it without delay and sometimes if the conclusion is actually you don’t have the resource to do so, paying that little bit more goes a long way.

Try to speak the language of the person you’re talking to…particularly with email!

I sent an email earlier this year to a client of ours. It was sent with positive intentions, was tapping into a subject we thought we could help with and was framed as an opportunity that we thought could be really exciting. Yet it was only after we received their response- highlighting the negative impact it could have on them personally- that we realised we’d f*cked up an otherwise great idea.

The reality is, if we’d really considered the language we used, we’d be looking at a very different outcome. The matter was resolved swiftly, but naturally the opportunity was dead. To say we learnt a lot from that experience is an understatement. In emails, your tone can be misinterpreted, there is no context behind the words you are writing and once you’ve sent an email, it can’t be unsent…So whether it’s to a client, a supplier, colleague or boss, you should never send an important email without putting yourself in the shoes of the person receiving it. And better yet, maybe just have a call or meeting if it’s that important!

Thank you to everyone whose allowed us to fail emphatically this year. It’s allowed us to grow as content creators and human beings. As we look forward to 2020, I’m sure there will be even more lessons to learn. 

p.s. please feel free to share your biggest mistakes of 2019!