It turns out you don’t know you’re old until one day you decide to grow a beard again for the first time in years. A week later you’re looking in the mirror and a forty-something guy is looking back at you … with a gray beard. Reality sets in and you start complaining about back pain, or the neighbor’s kids on the lawn.
So, I have become an old gray beard. And that’s a good thing. I’ve never felt more confident or assured in my work as a communications strategist. I don’t know where the time has gone but, somehow, I’ve clocked up more than two decades in this game.
And, without being arrogant, I thought I had marketing and communications all but figured out. A couple of years ago, on these very pages, I wrote a blog entitled: “The Big Reason Your Marketing Might Not Be Working”. If you scroll down beneath this piece, you will find it.
I wrote about how marketing savvy is no longer a competitive advantage but basic table stakes. That in order to differentiate yourself and be heard above the cacophony of noise that is the contemporary media landscape, you need to focus on your purpose. Because audiences connect to voices with purpose and filter out the rest. Companies who try to make the world better, by making their industry better, are using the force of business for good.
I still stand by these points. But about a year ago, I had a moment of clarity and came to realize that there was something else that I was missing from my analysis.
I was leading the marketing and communications strategy for a tech company with no budget and no team other than me. I was working hard but struggling to deliver impact. Despite my more than 20 years in marketing, with the battle scars and gray hair to show for it, none of my strategies or tactics were working.
I’m not the first in-house communications professional to face the fear of not knowing how to make things work. I won’t be the last. But let me share with you what I did: I went back to basics, back to the proverbial drawing board.
I conducted a quick stocktake of communications and quickly realized that most of my time and energy was being spent on thought leadership and PR tactics that were way too sophisticated for where the company was in its development. Some of what I was delivering was Fortune 500 standard communications, which was inappropriate for a company in start-up mode. And the slick outputs I was producing were hitting an audience of not very many—who largely weren’t even business prospects. In other words, our communications outputs were not even hitting the target audience.
And this was mainly because, aside from deploying tactics we weren’t ‘mature’ enough for, audiences are simply no longer in the same places they once were.
Today’s more diversified media marketplace consists of many smaller actors with considerable micro-generation of content. We have Youtubers, bloggers and podcasters. The barriers to entry to producing content have been removed. In a sense—we have gone back to a more localized way of communication. The analogy of the campfire, the pub or the town hall is a good way of thinking of how to disseminate your messages and advertise your product or service.
So, I developed a procedural model designed with built-in metrics to chart the maturity of the company. I reallocated focus on the few tactics that better fitted the organization’s maturity level and audience and to my great relief, it started to yield results.
Within just three months of deploying the model, the organization went from generating no Marketing Qualified Leads to generating multiple opportunities without any extra costs, tools, or infrastructure. All that changed was that we used my model to make better decisions.
This was when I circled back to my business partner, Nick O’Hara, with whom I had previously ‘diagnosed’ the problem of contemporary communications with and designed some great thought leadership consultancy programs, with purpose at the heart of everything we did for ourselves and our clients. We analyzed a number of small to medium-sized businesses and, sure enough, found that they were, for the main part, simply not mature enough in their communications development for thought leadership tactics to convert into business outcomes. They’re not yet in a place where traditional or new media PR will really capture tangible results.
So, we set to work and together we’ve enhanced the model to make it adaptable to a wider number of settings. From this new model we are now able to create a bespoke Comms Maturity Program tailored to the unique dynamics of most organizations.
Our Comms Maturity Program recognizes that the work needs to be done on building your platform and attracting people, not on chasing audiences that don't want to listen to you. Our model allows you to focus on using your own existing budget and resources on things that will actually make your marketing and communications more effective. It enables you to prioritize those resources to maximum impact.
And it’s an approach that works for everything from a one-person shop to a mature, medium-sized business. It would also work for larger corporations, but they probably have big teams doing many of this already—perhaps just not as systematically as our model, in many cases.
While most agencies will deliver you reports and outputs but very little—if anything—by way of outcomes, we will get you to where you need to be by using a bespoke approach that is systematic and fine-tuned to your business.
And you can trust me on this. If my gray beard has anything to say about it.