Comms strategy advice for startups
I was recently invited by Salmon Crew member James Sandrini to speak to a few ecommerce founders about comms strategy, social media, and how to do these two things effectively when you're tight on resources.
In a situation like this, it's useful to check your biases. I’ve spent 15+ years in creative agencies working with mid-size to enterprise businesses, so needed to adjust to the reality of earlier stage brands and businesses.
Here are some of the questions we discussed:
“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?”
If you're asking yourself similar questions on behalf of a client or for your own business, this article is for you. I hope it's helpful. Let's get started.
“How would the tactics change if you're restricted on budgets?”
The first thing to know or remember is that channel multiplier effects are real regardless of a business's size. Dr Grace Kite has documented this. So having 3-4 active channels beats going deep on 1-2, although there are diminishing returns if you go to 5-6 because it dilutes your resources.
Within this, we then need to go back to the two fundamental roles of any marketing communications. You’re either building your reputation to those currently outside of the market (aka brand building), or capturing revenue from those in-market (aka sales activation). It's really as simple as that.
And most early stage 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. So why should you invest in building your reputation alongside capturing short-term revenue? A few reasons:
Across categories, 90% of people are out of the market at any given point. Even if it’s not scientifically accurate, it’s directionally useful, because it encourages you to respect your audience's time.
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 is strongly linked with not only greater sales volumes but also greater pricing power, which gives you market defensibility against cheaper products people can find elsewhere.
Your competitors are probably not doing this, so by doing it even in smaller amounts you'll get yourself into a position of advantage.
From a tactical level, a useful mix I've seen for earlier stage companies is creative PR and creator partnerships (as reputation drivers), coupled with performance social and PPC (as revenue drivers). Consider starting here.
Organic social is also 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. The cost of failure is low so experiment widely, and then back your bangers with paid.
Generally speaking though, doing fewer things and only backing your bangers with sustained paid distribution feels like a wise move. The opportunity cost of trying to beat the social algorithm on the daily is too big. This is true for any size of business, but especially so for startups.
“Is the world of high quality content over with AI? What’s next?”
It depends on what you mean by high quality.
If it means content that is educational or instructional, probably AI is gonna eat that up. If it means content with decent enough production values, possibly. If it means content that has a point of view and personality which resonates with real people, not sure we're 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, so things like trusting the messenger or costly signalling in media become even more important.
Say you invest in a video series that is AI generated and runs on your Instagram and delivers on all your messaging points, then yes in this case AI wins and in theory you don’t need to do anything else. Go to the pub.
Say, alternatively, you have the exact same message delivered by a creator people trust, who genuinely loves your product, and visibly goes to huge lengths to create highly entertaining content that delivers on your message.
It’s the same message, framed differently and delivered differently, which in an AI slop environment becomes immediately much more distinctive. I see more people talking about 'proof of humanity', and this will matter more. Purely because it will be the rare thing people see in their feeds.
It’s like an IKEA Effect for 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 feels logical.
It seems to me a lot of the hyped narratives around AI, advertising and content presume that all you need is to produce information at scale and deliver it to people, and history shows that’s never how our minds work.
“How do we find the good balance between great/memorable content and content that converts?”
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 complicated and pricey like econometrics, I'd do a series of A/B tests to determine the relative value of brand-led comms.
When I worked with O2 in the UK, we were tasked with announcing their partnership with Samsung to launch their new flip phone. The problem is that this wasn't an exclusive partnership, and the product was already out so there was no real new news to speak to. So what was the hook, if any?
In the absence of deep differentiation, we went for a pure distinctiveness approach. We needed to prime people enough to want to choose buying it from O2 purely on the basis of us being memorable, familiar and likable.
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 00s band to feature in the film. We documented everything at The O2, and then distributed this in owned, paid and media channels.
That gave us a sufficiently primed audience pool which we retargeted with product ads, using footage from the same campaign, but with a much greater focus on what made the product special and worth buying now.
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 when compared to "convert only" tactical rollouts. The commercial results followed. Everyone was happy.
The point here is simple. Have an element of comms designed to warm people up to you, without asking anything in return, and then use that to create primed retargeting pools where you do ask for something in return.
Remember, emotional ads by themselves are meaningless, but they are a great lubricant to get people to subconsciously accept things you will 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. It's a super simple story to tell.
Problem is, studies show that the fidelity levels of targeting are usually around 50-60%, so it’s basically random. Plus targeting is not proven to be a significant driver of advertising profit, though most marketers think it is.
I’m not saying targeting is all wrong. I'm saying we over-emphasise its role in campaign effects. Sometimes businesses focus on targeting people who, by virtue of already being in-market, would buy from you anyway.
Instead, have some money doing this, but not all of it. You’re operating on a dual time horizon. Grow revenue among those in-market, and create or reinforce your reputation 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. Not even 'big ideas' (there is a time and place for that), but just really good tactical ones. A bit like we used to see really good tactical print executions that actually provoked a response.
It seems to me we have a skills gap where most 'big idea' creatives think product-led tactical comms are beneath them, and digital performance people are not trained in thinking about communications concepts.
So what would happen if we brought these skills together? I'd try pairing experienced copywriters who excel at product-led comms or direct response advertising, with modern social video specialists who know the ins and outs of how to be noticed in platform better than anyone.
You get the best of both worlds, at least in theory. Experts in making something noticeable in modern media environments, and experts in making something memorable in good ol' people's brains. It'll probably feel weird for a bit, but my bet is that it eventually yields great work.
