Great Digital Marketing Starts Before You Choose the Channel

Brandpaper founder Adam Brown shares a customer-first approach to digital marketing at the GMAC Annual Conference in New Orleans.

One of the easiest mistakes in marketing is starting with the channel. Should we be on Instagram? Should we invest more in paid search? Do we need a podcast? What about LinkedIn, YouTube, streaming or display advertising? Those can all be important questions. But they aren't the first question.

Great marketing starts with understanding people.

That was one of the central ideas behind a digital marketing presentation delivered by Adam Brown, founder of Brandpaper, at the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) Annual Conference in New Orleans. The session explored how organizations can build more effective digital marketing strategies by connecting three things that are too often treated separately: storytelling, the customer journey and channel strategy. And that approach closely reflects the philosophy behind Brandpaper today:

We don't start with creative. We start with people.

Start With the Customer, Not the Campaign

Marketers have access to more channels, platforms and targeting tools than ever before. But more options don't necessarily produce better marketing. Before selecting a channel, brands need to understand who they are trying to reach. That means going beyond basic demographic characteristics such as age, income and geography. It also means understanding psychographics: people's interests, habits, behaviors, lifestyles, motivations and preferences. 

Those insights help answer a much more important question:

What matters to the customer?

Once a brand understands that, positioning, messaging, creative and media decisions become significantly more focused. That's the refinement Brandpaper believes strong consumer research should create.

Build the Story Around the Customer

Strong brands tell stories. But the brand doesn't necessarily need to be the hero of that story. A simple storytelling framework starts with a hero who encounters a problem, meets a guide who provides a plan, takes action and ultimately reaches an outcome. In marketing, the customer is the hero. The role of the brand is to understand the customer's problem and help provide a path forward. That distinction can fundamentally change marketing communication. 

Instead of asking, What do we want to tell people about ourselves?, marketers can ask:

What does our customer need to hear from us right now?

That question becomes especially powerful when combined with the customer journey.

Match the Message to the Customer Journey

Customers don't need the same message at every stage of their relationship with a brand. 

The customer journey can be organized into four stages:

Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Service

At the awareness stage, content should help customers recognize or better understand a problem. During consideration, brands can provide clear pathways for overcoming that problem. As customers move toward purchase, marketing can demonstrate how the product or service provides a differentiated solution. After the purchase, communication should reinforce the buying decision and help customers successfully use the product or service. This means effective content strategy isn't simply about producing more content.

It's about delivering the right message at the right point in the customer journey.

Then Choose the Channels

Only after marketers understand the audience, story and customer journey should the conversation move toward channels. That can include inbound channels such as websites, SEO, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and organic social media, as well as outbound tactics including paid social, paid search, display advertising, streaming media and CRM. Even with SEO, effective marketing requires more than simply adding keywords to a webpage. Strong content needs useful headlines, explanations and examples alongside technical fundamentals such as title tags, meta descriptions, concise URLs, H1 tags, internal links and image alt text.

The lesson is simple:

Don't choose a tactic because it's popular. Choose it because it connects your brand with the people you're trying to reach.

Don't Force It

Near the end of the presentation, one slide contained only three words:

Don't Force It.

That's an important idea in an environment where brands can feel pressure to participate in every new platform, format and trend. A brand doesn't need to be everywhere. It needs to understand its audience well enough to know where it should be, what it should say and why its customers should care.

The presentation concluded with four principles for building an effective digital marketing strategy:

1. Create a compelling story.

2. Use the customer journey to tell that story.

3. Select the inbound and outbound channels that reach your target audience.

4. Don't force it.

From Insights to Refinement

At Brandpaper, we believe stronger brands are built through a process of refinement. Consumer research uncovers what people actually think, feel and need. Those insights sharpen positioning. Better positioning creates clearer strategy. And clearer strategy provides the foundation for more powerful creative.

Research → Insight → Positioning → Strategy → Creative

Rather than starting with What should the campaign look like?, we prefer to begin somewhere else:

Who are we trying to reach, and what matters to them?

Because when brands understand people better, everything that follows gets sharper.