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Care about your audience
There is not enough emphasis put on the actual consumer. I could not explain to all of you watching or listening more, how many marketing ideas literally spend no time on, will the person on the other side like this? It’s just how many do we have to sell or this is the way it’s always been done or I don’t mind interrupting them in the middle of a video and giving them my video, which has no context to what they were watching, and I’m going to be sell, sell, sell. They don’t care that they’re following you around the internet and running 100 ads at you. They don’t care that they’re bombarding you into buying something. Caring when it comes to marketing is respecting one’s time. I think we don’t respect consumer’s time. I think that if we’re going to fill them with messages, wouldn’t it be nice for them to enjoy it? I think you see it happen once in a while. The Super Bowl, I would say, is a place where we do a better job caring. We try to actually make that 30 second video entertaining. I think I see it every day in social media. I see young brands, new brands actually make content that people want to watch and they do entertainment that happens to also be advertising, but those are very far and few in between in today’s world.
Listen at scale
I would say my number one strategy is something I’ve done my whole life, which is before I start talking, I listen. And you know, obviously as a personal public figure, it seems like I’m always talking ’cause that’s also what I make in my content, but almost everything that comes out of my mouth has been predicated on me doing a lot of hours of listening. Social media’s greatest power is the ability to see what people are thinking. VaynerMedia, my advertising agency, we have a function, a job in the strategy department called PCS, Post Creative Strategist. Their job is literally to read all the comments of every single comment based on the stuff we post on social and the comments of competitors’ products and posts. This is one big game of listening. We are living in the golden era of consumer insights because of social media. You are able to extract all sorts of hypothesis and ideas and understandings of consumers, and so I have a strategy. It’s been the strategy in my life. It’s listening on the internet at scale to as many different opinions and thoughts around products and services to then form better innovations and adjustments of products and services.
Offer a solution
Taking what you read on social media and layering it into strategies becomes a talent game. If you know that everyone is trying to eat less heavy, right? And not just from a calorie standpoint, but let’s say from a clean eating versus the alternative, the question is, what do you then do about it? Do you change the formula of your product or do you make your messaging allude to the places where you’re scratching that itch or bringing value to that audience? I think the best businesses in the world are fixing something that everyone’s complaining about, but hasn’t been fixed yet. I’ve always looked for pain points, friction, things that people don’t like. I’ll give you a good example historically, drive-through fast food. People value time and obviously someone eventually along the way, probably in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, said, you know what? Instead of making them park and walk in and wait in line and get their burger and fries, why don’t we just let them drive through and be able to save those seven minutes? That was a very strong innovation, a good idea. Other times, it was the benefits of the product, maybe taking out an ingredient, maybe putting in an ingredient. This is what you do through focus groups historically. This is what you now can do through social listening at scale. That is a skillset creatively that is needed to take the insights and form them into an output.