Nine skills
Executing your marketing plan takes up to nine skills. And most
creative shops don't cover all the bases. Instead, try
one guy with all nine.
1. Creative concepts. Where it starts - a strategic
idea that can be rolled out across your marketing strategy, unifying the offer
and delivering your message in a way that hits home for your target market.
The hard-but-fun part. Learn
about it.
2. Information architecture. Sounds hard, but
it's just a structure for the idea - the way everything's organised, which
boxes connect to which arrows and how all the moving parts interact. Big wallcharts
abound. See how it's done.
3. Content strategy. Deciding what you put into
your architecture that's readable by humans - themes, subjects, words and
pictures. An outline of headlines and wordcounts early on can focus a whole
programme of activity, enabling space to be booked and resources to be allocated.
Read more on it.
4. Application design. The job of specifying what you
want your customer to do when he interacts with your campaign
or programme. Involves things like use cases, interaction modelling, and customer
journeys to plan out the business functionality that leads to your goal. See
some examples.
5. User experience. The look and feel of your
content; defining how people experience you.The interface
in its broader context - the context of human understanding and how people
really react. Hard. Learn
my approach.
6. One-to-one communications make use of the information
you gather from your users to talk back to them. It's about deciding what
to capture, how to use it to increase your sales, and how to build those contacts
into a managed conversation over time, creating a solid customer relationship.
See how useful it can be.
7. Campaign creation. A brand is a personality; to
be likeable that personality has to look and feel authentic and consistent
across multiple media and executions within each campaign, talking with the
same voice wherever you hear it. See
how it works.
8. Programme management. Once the campaign or programme
is rolling, the next step is to manage its performance. That means measuring
results and KPIs, taking decisions, and folding those decisions into the next
round of communications. It happens with intelligent results tracking and
meaningful reporting. Discover
how I do it.
9. Killer copy. Plain talk: use of words to communicate
ideas. It's where Redpump's Chris
started - as an ad agency copywriter. Read
about my approach.