Is marketing an art or a science?
I’ve heard very strong arguments on both sides of this debate. I’m sure you have to.
I once attended an event where the three panelists all took it in turns to tear strips out of the moderator who had just suggested that marketing was mainly artistic fluff!
The truth is that in today’s environment, marketing is as much a technical skill as it is a creative one.
Scientific levels of experimentation and analysis are fundamental to a good strategy.
Lucy Heavens knows this all too well. Now heading up the marketing team at Salv, she’s been working in fintech for 26 years - long enough to remember when it was just called ‘banking technology’!
As we discussed, knowing when to apply experimentation and execution is the differentiator between a good marketer and a great one.
The following 7 min read covers topics including:
- Strategy vs execution
- Marketing experimentation
- Video & storytelling
- Distribution tactics
If you’re interested in learning from one of the pros, then read on!
Strategy, strategy, strategy
Lucy likes to think about strategy simply as a way of getting from A to B.
Like travelling in a car, the route is determined by the destination.
“You don't just get in your car and start driving and hope that at some point you're going to get to the location that you need to get to”
So why in marketing do we often jump straight to the execution, before we’ve decided the exact outcomes we’re aiming for?
As Lucy observes, execution is ‘the sexy part’.
Everyone wants to jump in and get their hands dirty, and it’s very human to want to spend time doing rather than thinking.
This needs to be matched by a strategic drive though.
And that’s where the two sides of science come in.
On the one hand, you’re taking lots of data, devising a hypothesis, and confirming that by collecting more data.
But sometimes you won’t have all the data, and you have to experiment blind.
“You’re not quite sure what will happen when you mix these two chemicals, but you try it anyway - that’s innovation”
This is informed experimentation, and is a key part of any good marketing strategy.
How does experimentation work when it comes to video?
Video comes in many forms.
For Lucy it’s a ‘crucial’ part of any marketing strategy.
But if you asked 10 different people what video marketing actually is, you’d get 10 different answers.
Long form. Short. Social content. Talking heads. Animations. Event video.
As with any other area of marketing, there’s a massive amount of subtlety and nuance.
And where there’s nuance, there’s a need to tailor your experiments to your needs.
This is where our A to B strategy comes back in.
“Marketers sometimes start with video by saying ‘I want to produce this thing’; they're not thinking about the journey and what problem that they're solving for”
The perils of jumping straight to execution are back. It’s easy to fall into the trap of committing what Lucy calls, a ‘random act of marketing’.
Instead, marketers should look to match their execution to an end goal.
Is it lead generation that’s most important right now?
Perhaps your webpage isn’t performing as well as it should, and you need an explainer to increase conversion?
Or maybe leads are dropping off in the funnel because of a lack of social proof, and some testimonial content might help?
Match your video strategy to your planned end destination, and you can’t go wrong.
Well that is unless you then create a bad video.
What makes a good video?
It’s hardly a surprise that, for Lucy, the answer lies in the strategy again.
Ultimately it depends on the channel and the intended use case.
“What a good video looks like on LinkedIn is very different to what a good video would look like on the product page of your website.”
But assuming you’ve already got that right, what else is important?
Grabbing attention quickly is a must.
You only have so long to get your point across, so as Lucy says, you need to get there quickly.
But perhaps even more important than that is that your videos tell a story.
All good stories have a humanising element - they speak to us almost on a personal, emotional level.
At Salv they’ve been doing just that with their recent product demo videos.
Instead of just going through the product and demonstrating the workflow and process, they decided to start with a scenario:
A bank is investigating a financial crime.
“We took a step back to think about what's going on behind the scenes – one of the customers has been a victim”
So let’s start the video with that contextual information, and thread it throughout the demo.
Let’s tell the story of an elderly woman who’s been defrauded out of her life savings.
Suddenly the process part of the demo is a lot more meaningful and engaging, because the audience can imagine a real-world application and the real human effects.
Distribution and maximising your output
Now you’ve got a good video - the challenge is maximising its impact. And that starts with your distribution strategy.
For Lucy, this isn’t just relevant to video, but to all marketing.
As she often likes to say to her team, ‘we're not short of ideas’.
In marketing, not only do you have a ton of ideas from within the team, but also from the rest of the business.
“But what a lot of people forget is that the hardest part of marketing is not actually having the ideas or even creating the content, it’s the distribution”
Unless you have a limitless budget, then you can’t put the content everywhere - so you’ve got to be smart with it.
Lucy’s top tip here is to look for content distribution partners and collaborate. You can reach more communities this way.
What channels are working well at the moment?
For Salv, organic social is key.
But success on these platforms doesn’t happen overnight - as Lucy observes, good engagement is the result of 12 months of consistent work.
Actually limiting your approach is a smart move here.
“You can't do everything, just like you can't be in two places at once, so pick a couple of channels and double down on them”
As already discussed, the key is consistency.
Experiment, yes, but within a defined scope of boundaries, and then evaluate at key moments.
Wrap up
We couldn’t let Lucy go without getting her take on her favourite bit of fintech content from the past few years.
This one is certainly out there!
Engagement and entertainment in spades.
And as Lucy points out, they also filmed a reaction video to help double down on the buzz from the initial piece of content.
Perhaps that was the strategy from the very beginning . . .
