How do you decide which sales and marketing channels to pursue?
How do you make your brand memorable and well-positioned in the global marketplace?
How do you create an experience so seamless that you earn loyal customers for life?
The answer? Sales-marketing alignment, of course. But what does that look like—and, more importantly, what should you do when you need to get your numbers up NOW?
Get back to basics. Specifically, these three business basics.
3 Business Basics That Foster Sales-Marketing Alignment
Get crystal-clear on whose problems your business and offer is solving. Who are your raving fans? What keeps them up at night? What do they want? How does your offer help them get it (or avoid an outcome they don’t want)?
Identify where they congregate and speak in terms they will recognize.
2. Be a person
People like doing business with people. We’re all human and we’ve all got never-ending to-do lists and overstuffed schedules—give your customers a reason to pause and feel good.
Ask about the kids or the vacation they mentioned. Drop them a handwritten holiday card or thank-you note. Relationship selling goes a long way.
3. Have a vision
Your brand is not your logo. Or your headquarters. Or your menu of services and products. If you want to build a Giant brand, you’ve got to think bigger than that.
Start with why, as Simon (Sinek) says. Dream up an epic brand storyline. Invite your customers into an experience that will turn them into raving fans.
Direct to camera, face framed in shadow, British-actor Tom Hiddleston enunciates advice in a prep-school accent as sharp as his bespoke suit, “World domination starts with attention to detail.”
The scene is from a video ad for the Jaguar F-TYPE R Coupe. It’s part of a larger campaign expounding upon the so-called “Art of Villainy.”
(The campaign hashtag? #GoodToBeBad.)
World domination is clearly the carmaker’s ultimate objective. Because every detail of this campaign was executed flawlessly.
Watch it below and keep reading for our top takeaways from this impactful campaign!
Seven (Fiendishly) Powerful Marketing Lessons From Jaguar’s “British Villains” Campaign
1. Demand attention with questions.
The campaign centers around videos, most of which open with attention-compelling questions.
“Have you ever noticed that in Hollywood movies all the villains are played by Brits?”
“They say Brits play the best villains, but what makes a great villain?”
“They say absolute power corrupts.” Pause. “What’s wrong with that?”
2. Twist a trope.
“British villains” captures our curiosity instantly because it takes a figure we all recognize – the self-contained, lethally stylish evil mastermind – and presents him in an unexpected role: as a mentor.
They’re all male, by the way, all three of the British actors deployed in the campaign: Tom Hiddleston, Ben Kingsley and Mark Strong.
(Had I been involved, I would have lobbied for the inclusion of an icy, stiletto-shod archvillainess.)
3. Ensnare the senses.
Even though the videos are, well, videos, and thus limited to the two senses of sight and sound, they do a masterful job of provoking your imagination to involve your other senses.
The tactile whir of helicopter blades.
The screech of a car skidding sideways on a puddle. (You can almost feel the centrifugal force pull your body sideways.)
Elegant hands clicking a button. Clicking off the radio. Grasping the wheel. Unzipping a bag (full of money, naturally).
The throaty growl of the Jaguar’s engine.
Hiddleston intoning, “Brace yourselves.” (You can’t help but sit up straighter.)
4. Dominate through attention to detail.
This campaign theme was a bold choice because it easily could have veered into camp. Very expensive camp.
Supreme attention to the minutiae of the genre ensured that the videos and other materials delivered the proper message: That it is very good to be bad. And you should buy a Jag.
What do we mean by attention to detail? It’s the little things that add up to make an impression.
For example, the anonymous lackeys who hand off the aforementioned bag of money are shown wearing earpieces, the classic tough-guy sunglasses, and black leather gloves (the better to leave no fingerprints with, my dear).
5. Think bigger. Much bigger.
Quoted in the inestimable Hey Whipple, Squeeze This:
“It’s not just ‘I can do one good print ad.’ It’s ‘I can do a holistic, fully integrated, major, big chunky thought that is media infinite.’ It can run on TV, it can run in print, it can run in someone’s dinner conversation, the public relations people can work with it.” — Rob Schwartz of TBWACHIATDAY
6. Make your copy impeccable.
The campaign’s conceit was carried perfectly throughout the copy, which was a potpourri of genre cliches (“stay one step ahead”) and SAT words.
A selection of villainous vocabulary:
Instincts
Eloquence
Snarl
Cogitations
Lexicon
Acceleration
Behest
Rendezvous
Obsessed
Uncompromising
Discerning
Focused
Precise
Associates
Understated
Threat
Bespoke
Razor-sharp
The perfect accomplice
One step ahead
Royal
Throne
Kings
Fortress
Realm
“It’s all mine”
7. Address their aspirational selves.
Buy a Jaguar, the “British Villains” campaign promises, and every time you fit yourself into the fine leather seat, press that red button and feel the threatening growl of the engine, you will feel a rush of sophistication, control and power.
You will feel like a shameless, uncompromising mastermind with the world at your beck and call.
Never make your target customer feel bad about who or where they are right now in life. Speak to them as if they already are, or are on their way to becoming, their ideal version of themselves. Give them a vision to step into.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen. I need to go order some black suede Louboutin “Pigalle Follies” and an F-TYPE Convertible in Italian Racing Red.
Have you lived through this entrepreneur or nonprofit nightmare?
You identify your target audience, ideal persona, brand voice and creative style.
You identify your strategies for marketing with traditional and new media channels.
You work your tail off to create a marketing plan (you’d be amazed at how many people don’t do that) to generate great marketing, business expansion, revenue or brand awareness.
And then… the plan fails.
The event doesn’t fill. Sales are sluggish. Donations are down.
Shudder. You don’t ever want to endure that time-wasting exercise and frustration again. So, let’s talk about some of the traps you may have fallen into when making your marketing plan.
3 Deadly Strategic Marketing Planning Traps to Beware
Trap #1:
You didn’t set clear, measurable goals (or you did – but you set them unrealistically high).
Now, don’t get us wrong. At Giant Voices, we’re all about ambition.
Big goals have their own energy. They inspire action, passion, commitment. But there’s a fine line between ambition and self-sabotaging overreach.
Let’s pretend you are making a plan for your year-end membership drive. Start by looking at the numbers from the past few years—say they’re 77, 81, 68 and 75.
If you don’t set a target figure at all, you’re robbing yourself of the motivation that a good goal brings—AND of the satisfaction that comes from achieving a goal.
If you set your goal unrealistically high—say, 275 when you’ve never gotten higher than 81—you are likely to fail. Spectacularly. Which is rough on staff morale, and also kind of makes you look delusional.
In goal setting, as in life, it’s all about balance.
Trap #2:
The plan is watered down to appeal to everyone.
“Everyone” is not a target audience. Even if, technically, everyone could use your product, it doesn’t mean everyone wants to. (How many middle-aged men buy Barbie dolls?)
Instead of trying to craft a general message that will convince the masses to buy your product, zero in on the people who are already buying the kind of thing you’re selling.
Who will love what you sell? Who will rave about you?
Trap #3:
The plan is scattered.
Print! Radio! Email! Twitter! Vine! Pinterest! Blogging! Growth hacking! (What’s growth hacking again? We went to that workshop and everybody’s doing it. We’d better do it, too.)
Unless you have a massive staff and budget, don’t try to cram ALL THE THINGS into your marketing plan. It’s better to use five channels really well than 12 channels halfheartedly.
Our flagship course, Giant Academy, features structured, practical instruction that teaches you how to achieve your next G.I.A.N.T. goal in marketing, advertising, social media and more.
At Giant Voices, we believe in creative driven by strategy. The most important metric for an ad, brochure, tweet or outrageous guerrilla stunt is not oohs or wows or industry awards—it’s client results.
That’s why every single word in everything we produce for a client has strategy and sweat equity behind it.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at a strategic, effective headline. Taking care with every detail of creative is an example of how to communicate your brand effectively.
Creating a Strategic, Effective Headline
Goals of an ad headline
When creating an ad, you only have a handful of words—sometimes just two or three!—to:
Seize and keep a death-grip on the reader’s attention
Maintain the brand personality
Stay consistent with the larger strategic marketing campaign
Avoid cliches
Work with the art
Speak to your ideal target market
Persuade the reader to take a certain action
Basically, if you’re doing them right, headlines are the copywriting equivalent of one of those cooking reality shows where wannabe celebrity chefs have to conjure a five-star dinner out of yak fillets, pineapple rings, and a crocus.
Example of strategic ad headline writing
The strategic goals that drove this specific headline
Maintain consistency with established brand characteristics, among them brief, serious-sounding headlines with subtly surprising double meanings
Position spring waterfalls as an attraction
Frame their fleetingness as a feature, not a bug
Intrigue viewers enough to get them to read the body copy (and click the ad)
Distinguish this ad from other destination ads.
Why this headline works
Our Creative Giants came up with dozens—literally—of possible headlines until they arrived at this one. Let’s examine why this works:
Positioning (copy must work hand-in-glove with art, which is the proverbial whole ‘nother conversation)
Brevity invites engagement (because it’s so short, reading it requires only a small commitment of time and attention)
Conveys value
Conveys urgency
Consistent with past ad format
Familiar phrase rendered in a sleek, restrained type and paired with an unexpected image creates curiosity
Double meaning creates a little burst of pleasure when it “clicks” in the reader’s mind
When you’re next creating an ad headline for your brand, take these notes into account to find the right messaging that both delivers results and meets your expectations.
If you want GIANT results from your marketing efforts, “good” isn’t good enough. Make excellence your standard. Follow our five quick tips on how to elevate your marketing from good to excellent.
5 Quick Tips to Take Your Marketing to Another Level
1. Define excellence.
How will you measure the results of your campaign, classified ad or clever guerrilla tactic? How will you know you succeeded or failed? What would demonstrate runaway success?
2. Know the audience better than your spouse.
What keeps your ideal customer up at night? What makes her heart beat faster?
3. Be a creative decorator crab.
Always be looking, reading, asking, learning and absorbing. What ideas and innovations can you glean from other industries? What awesome thing did your competitor just do? How can you turn that on its head and make it better?
According to a famous saying, “Originality is the art of concealing your sources.” This quote is, fittingly, attributed to several different people.
4. Go one more step.
There’s always something you can do to make it better. One more phone call you can make. One more hour of research. One more brain to tap or pair of eyeballs to look over the work. When you’ve gotten to “good enough,” keep going.
5. Check again.
No matter how pressing the deadline, you’ll never regret taking a moment to stop and look through the work—really look through it—one more time before hitting “send.”
Do you use a consistent case (sentence or title) in headlines? Is everything spelled correctly? How’s your grammar? You purchased usage rights for that photo, right?
