Essential Perspectives: Your Most Important Marketing Asset

When creating your brand, your logo, or any creative asset, the success of the piece relies on far more than just simply “making sure it looks cool.” Of course, strong design and clear messaging are vital to any piece you create, but as essential as the creative quality may be it is not the anchor which determines whether that piece is set up to succeed and do the job it’s intended.

Too often small businesses tend to approach creative with a stubborn certainty of what they “really need.” Clients approach saying “we really just need a website,” or “we want to get the logo and we’ll be done.” Too often they see the creative in a vacuum; as if the pice will help them gain business simply by existing. In reality, the way a creative piece works extends far beyond it’s simple creation. In fact, the pieces you may need to win new business are dependent on a marketing principle that mist small businesses unintentionally overlook when determining their creative needs.

Your most important piece of marking.

It’s a simper rule of thumb that the most important piece of marketing is whatever piece leaves your “shop.” Period. Full-stop. Whatever piece goes away and travels beyond your ability to control it becomes the most important piece of marketing.

Now, the term “shop” just simply means your home base. Whether it’s a brick-and-mortar place, your website, or even your social media profile. These are spaces where you control your brand message. When we can control the message, we can usually market to our audience effectively towards sales because we are controlling their experience. But what about when a piece of our marketing leaves that controlled space?

Ironically, once a piece of our creative marketing leaves the “shop” and goes out into the wild it becomes even more impactful than the marketing we were controlling. Think about word-of-mouth; that is your branding message being passed around beyond your control, out in the bigger world beyond the spaces you manage. That word of mouth can have incredible ability to draw people to your space, and yet you have very little control over it once it’s out there. This lack of control is why it becomes so important; you want to make sure the message left your space correctly.

More than just gossip.

Word of mouth promotion is valuable. But if those people talking about your brand are saying things correctly, it will be all that much more effective in drawing people in to your products or services. That messaging – the literal phrases and ideas people spread through word of mouth – are a creative asset. Clear messaging and concise framing of ideas is about sharp copywriting and correct phraseology. If you communicate well with an audience while they are in a space you control, the message that “leaves your shop” has a higher likelihood of being as close as possible to what you want people beyond your control to hear.

This idea goes well beyond just words and copywriting. Think about your logo. If it is memorable, it will draw curiosity even when you’re not there emphasizing it. Even if people aren’t in the market for what you’re selling, a memorable logo will stick with them and “travel” across markets. If your mark is recognizable, people will recall it. That goes a long way to helping win new business.

What about your social media? Are your posts interesting and share-worthy? Or are they just aggressive sales-hype? Your social media content “leaves the shop” at a far faster rate than many other piece of marketing, so you want to make sure it has a lifecycle that’s vibrant once it’s beyond your control. Is your content memorable, interesting and compelling? Does it have theme or wit or competence?

Printed pieces are one of the most impactful components of tens that will carry your brand in your absence. Paper is curious in how it can sometimes go on remarkably long journeys, passing through several hands, before it comes to a stop. How many people will coincidentally see a flyer you “set free” into he wild? How many places will a brochure get placed? Then there is your business card or envelopes or any other simple collateral; these tend to “get around” once we put them into he world. While we live in a strongly technological world, the printed piece has a compelling way of carrying messaging in a way far more intimate than technology can deliver. Are you certain print is not something you need?

Word of mouth has invaluable marketing power, but it is hardly the only component that leaves our shop. A smart marketing strategy thinks about the way things leave, and what they carry, when determining what creative assets they really need.

Bad apples roll far.

Where most companies fail terribly is not just in their lack of control of the marketing which leaves their control, but more often when they do not control the negative marketing that leaves. If word of mouth can draw new business, bad gossip can drive it away. So if your branding message is awkward or foolish or boring, well, that impressing gets taken away, and that is the message people begin sayin about you. That negative messaging spreads without any control on your part – and often without clients even being aware. All because they weren't careful in creating their message.

“Not bothering to spend the extra effort to control the message beforehand can have ramifications that are far more costly. You’re not saving money when you pay less on messaging that ends up costing you a lot more revenue in the future.”

This happens a lot. Clients try to cut creative corners, settling for “it’s good enough for now.” But audiences see that half-ass effort, and it compares starkly with other brands that have a tighter delivery. Not bothering to spend the extra effort to control the message beforehand can have ramifications that are far more costly. You’re not saving money when you pay less on messaging that ends up costing you a lot more revenue in the future.

If you go back to social media, you can often see people trying to cut corners on their content and not realizing their best efforts are having the opposite effect than intended. Often clients will throw out tons and tons of content, and in the privacy of their own minds believe they are being clever. Plus, because they are working on it so much, they believe the extra effort will become fruitful. But if that content is corny, or lacks interest, or seems amateur-ish, those ideas will be what leaves the shop and not the intended messaging the client worked so hard to deliver. And because the client just keeps making more and more posts, that incorrect, unimpressive message compounds. Soon, the client is at a confused loss to understand why their social media efforts are just not working, without realizing that the impression they were leaving with an audience beyond their control was literally turning them off at every experience.

Print has this ability in very profound ways. Many clients think their audience will overlook a simple logo, or not really care about the quality of their business card. “People are just going to throw it away,” they think. “Why would we front extra cost for something we know will end in the garbage can?” Well, people can spot plain and know it’s less than impressive, Folks can feel cheap and know it’s lower quality than refined. That little piece of so-called eventual-trash sends a very important message about just how much effort you sink into the details.

If an audience sees you putting in effort, they will believe your product or service is handled carefully, with just as much effort and insight. Yet if your messaging is quick-and-dirty, with evidently minimal effort, that is how your audience will presume you do your work. And all it takes is one bad apple to roll far, and you suddenly have a strong reputation that is set against you.

You don’t always know what leaves, so have fewer exits.

All of this can make a client feel paranoid. With so many variables and factors, how on earth could anyone control their reputation and messaging, especially a smaller business?

The trick is to limit what’s out there to only that which is most effective. Rather than try to attack every platform for marketing outreach, why not do an excellent job on a few that are highly likely to set your messaging correctly? This recalls the earlier point about how creative content is determined; picking only the right method of marketing helps groom and shape the correct creative assets.

It’s like having fewer exits. If there is a crowded room with many doors, it is very easy for a negative reputation to "sneak out” before you’ve had a chance to correct that impression. But if there was only one door, and you were able to personally interact with each person who is exiting the room, you could do your best to make sure the right impression “leaves the shop.” Fewer exits helps ensure the best marketing leaves “into the wild.”

Determining what your best marketing strategy will be means stepping back and looking at how you want your message to enter the world. Sure, everyone would love it if the who world became familiar with hem overnight. But it is a lot more effective to build off of strong, positive reputations than it is to run the risk of lots of lousy impressions due to being spread too thin to monitor.

The mist important piece of marketing is whatever leaves the shop; good or bad, accurate or false. What is going leave and enter the wild is the most important for you to focus on. Which means knowing how things will leave (picking specific marketing platforms that are most in line with your message), as well as creative assets which travel the way your ant them to.