Comms strategy advice for startups
I was recently invited by Salmon Crew member James Sandrini to speak to a few ecommerce founders about some of my favourite topics: comms strategy, social media, how to do both of them effectively, and the deepest darkest secrets of the universe. Ok, this last one maybe less so. That’s the next session, I am told.
One big lesson I learned from the experience is to check my own biases when it comes to the advice I default to. I’ve spent 15+ years in creative agencies and usually working with mid size to large businesses, and suddenly needed to check how much of that advice was actually applicable to, say, a €1m turnover business.
A useful starting point was to go back to some of the advice I helped the Department of Creative Affairs codify in their Majority Rules report, but there were also pointy questions we discussed over the course of the Q&A. This is a summary of some of the main talking points, so we can make marketing evidence applicable for as many shapes of businesses as possible, rather than just the top 1% in terms of ad spend and team size.
Here are some of the questions we discussed, and possible answers to them. Read on to explore some ways of thinking around stuff like:
“How would the tactics change if you're restricted on budgets?”
“Is the world of high quality content over with AI? What’s next?”
“How do we find the good balance between great/memorable content and content that converts?”
“What’s the number one thing companies are wasting money on with ads?”
“What’s the one thing companies tend to be too stingy with?”
Let's get into it.
“How would the tactics change if you're restricted on budgets?”
The first thing to know or remember is that channel multipliers are still quite real regardless of your size. Dr Grace Kite has documented this. So, broadly speaking, 3-4 active channels beats going deep on 1-2, although there are probably diminishing returns if you go to 5-6 because it dilutes spend and resources too much.
Within this, we then need to go back to the two fundamental roles of any marketing communications. And while people will have different models for this (brand vs sales, awareness vs conversion, etc), I like to be very clear about the dynamics between the two.
You’re either building your reputation to those outside of the market (aka brand building), or capturing revenue from those in-market (aka sales activation). And most businesses focus on the second, which is the right thing to do, but at the expense of the first, which brings detrimental effects to both volume and value.
Now, at an earlier stage of business maturity, you want to have most of your budget to grow revenue among those in-market, but don’t forget to protect some budget to keep building reputation among those outside of it. This is because:
Evidence shows all brands grow by reaching lots of light buyers, not a smaller group of heavy ones, and this becomes especially pressing as you scale beyond your ‘close links’ customer base.
Some estimates point to about 90% of people being out of market at any given point. Even if it’s not scientifically accurate, it’s directionally useful, because it encourages you to respect your audience.
You’ll be maximising the odds of future purchases which builds a greater sense of momentum and commercial sustainability for your business, over simply relying on short term spikes or discounts.
You’re not just fishing in a small more engaged pond which tends to be more expensive to capture through paid media, because that’s where most of the demand is and so platforms hike ad prices.
Strong reputation tends to yield not only greater volumes but also greater pricing power and market defensibility against cheaper products people can find elsewhere.
Your competitors are probably not doing this so you’re immediately at an advantage if you do.
A useful mix for early stage companies tends to be creative PR and creator partnerships as more strategic reputation drivers, coupled with social and PPC ads as more tactical revenue drivers. Organic social is part of this but reach is not guaranteed, so I’d use it more as a creative R&D tactic rather than a reach driving one.
Doing fewer things but doing them better and with sustained media distribution feels like a wise move for any size of business, but especially so when you need to make hard choices on a limited budget and size of team.
“Is the world of high quality content over with AI? What’s next?”
It depends on what you mean by high quality. If high quality means content that is educational or instructional, then broadly yes. If it means content that has relatively decent production values, possibly. If it means content that has a point of view and consistent personality and a degree of humanity which makes it relatable, then I’m not convinced AI is there yet.
Now, I agree with the premise that AI will make content a commodity, and it’s much harder to stand out because you’re now playing a volume game. What I keep going back to is the harder to quantify sociological aspects of how people perceive brands and businesses, and so things like trusting the source of that content, or the subconscious power of media signalling, become more important as predictable drivers of choice.
Say you invest in say a video that is AI generated and runs on your Instagram and delivers on all your messaging, then yes in this case AI wins and in theory you don’t need to do anything else. But if you think in game theory terms, this is what most of your competitors will do as well which creates a general erosion of trust around what you see on Instagram in the first place. It feels like a short-term win, but that’s about it.
Say, alternatively, that you have the exact same message but it’s delivered by a creator you’ve worked with consistently, and they love your product, and you can tell they love it, and they offer a hugely entertaining way to talk about its benefits which makes the value of this message not just what it’s selling, but the fact you’re actually enjoying watching what you’re watching. It’s the same message, framed differently and delivered differently, which in an AI slop environment becomes immediately much more distinctive.
It’s a bit like an IKEA Effect for consumer communications, whereby the effort people assign to how something was made might make them trust it more. It’s a theory I have, I’ve not seen conclusive evidence of this, but it seems to me a lot of the AI narratives around content and advertising presume all you need is to produce the facts at scale and deliver them to people, and history shows that’s not how our minds work.
“How do we find the good balance between great/memorable content and content that converts?”
I think companies need to be much better at modelling the relationship between these two, and it goes back to the link between reputation and revenue. In the absence of something super complicated and expensive like econometric modelling, I’d design a series of A/B tests where you control most of the variables except one, and that one variable is your hypothesis. Then you run a series of those and get to ‘least wrong’ answers over time.
Let me give you an example. I used to work with a UK telecommunications company called O2, and we were tasked with launching the new Samsung Flip phone in the UK market. The problem they had is that this wasn’t a unique partnership, and there was nothing exclusive about it, and the product was actually already in-market and being advertised by Samsung, so there’s no real new news. So what was the hook, if any?
Our argument then was that we need to do something distinctive, and meaningful and entertaining, to prime people enough to want to choose buying it from O2 purely on the basis of familiarity and likability. So, rather than just running performance ads and trying to outshout or outbid competitors, we pitched this phone as a homage to the foldable phones of the 00s by saying “The noughties just got an upgrade”.
We did a (very retro) flashmob with TikTok dance creators. We brought back a band which was super massive in the UK in the 00s. We documented everything at The O2, the biggest music venue in the UK, and then distributed this in owned, paid and media channels purely as a brand reputation play.
Then, that gave us a sufficiently primed audience pool which was warmer to the brand because of prior exposure to something what was quite fun, and we retargeted them with with ads that talked about the product features using footage from the same campaign. So everything felt quite connected end to end.
And we were able to demonstrate that, by following this prime > convert model, their performance ads were far more efficient because people were more receptive to responding to them, and they saw significant increases in device sales compared to analogous device launch campaigns which only ran performance ads.
So this became the blueprint for future device launches, regardless if there were exclusivity deals or not. Prime people by establishing some sort of reputational cues and brand associations, and then you’re maximising the chances that people respond to follow up performance media.
If nothing else because it triggers something they’ve seen before, and crucially something that helped them feel something before. Remember, emotion by itself is meaningless, but it’s a great lubricant to get people to subconsciously accept things you tell them after. It’s classic System1 “entertain for commercial gain” stuff.
“What’s the number one thing companies are wasting money on with ads?”
Probably targeting. In theory targeting makes sense because you feel in control and it’s a predictable enough relationship between exposure to communications and commercial results, but studies show that the fidelity levels of targeting are usually around 50-60%, which means it’s basically random. Plus there’s empirical evidence that targeting is not that much of a driver of advertising profit, though most marketers think it is.
I’m not saying targeting is all wrong. I am saying we probably over-emphasize its role in the effects of our communications. Especially because sometimes businesses focus on targeting people who, by virtue of already being in-market and possibly even having bought from them before, they’ll likely do it again anyway. So you’re spending money for something to happen that statistically would happen regardless of that spend.
Instead, have some money doing this, but not all of it. Remember, you’re operating on a dual time horizon. Capture short-term revenue among those in-market, and create or reinforce reputational cues among those outside of the market so you can maximise the chances of having a commercially sustainable business.
“What’s the one thing companies tend to be too stingy with?”
Well thought out tactical ideas. I’m not even going to try and convince you about ‘big ideas’, because there is a time and a place for that and I’m not in the big advertising production business, I’m in the ‘helping you get results at different time horizons’ business. And sometimes the answer, let’s be honest, isn’t a big campaign.
But having someone who knows how to write product story ads that actually capture your imagination seems to me to be increasingly rare. Most conceptual creatives think it’s beneath them, and most platform specialists are not very good at conceptual thinking (sorry but statistically this is probably true).
We need to find ways for these two skillsets to meet more often. I would invest in pairing experienced short-form or direct response copywriters with high energy social video specialists, and see what they can come up with together.
