Welcome to Pinpoint, a weekly digest for marketers and leaders. In every issue you’ll find timely industry news, perspectives from experts, actionable marketing strategies, and links to other resources that can help you grow your business.
In this week’s issue:
- Why every brand needs a strategic narrative
- TikTok introduces a new way for brands to work with creators
- A paid social tip from a GrowTal expert
Strategy of the Week
When someone asks you to tell them about your business, where do you usually start?
If you’re like most people, you respond by explaining what you do (i.e. “we design and manufacture athletic clothing”) or you talk about when you started (i.e. “in 2016 we decided to create an athletic clothing brand”).
But people care less about the what and when and much more about the why.
A strategic narrative is a framework that helps you communicate your why. It helps people—your employees, your investors, your prospective customers—better understand why your brand and products exist, who they exist for, and how they help people get from point A to point B.
A strategic narrative is built using 5 key elements, as explained by Andy Raskin, one of the earliest individuals to start educating marketers on how to craft strategic narratives. To craft a great strategic narrative, you need to do the following:
- Name a big, undeniable change impacting your target audience.
- Help people understand there will be winners and losers depending on how they respond to the undeniable change.
- Tease the promised land, or in other words, help your target audience understand what their lives could be like if they respond to the change the right way.
- Introduce the magic gifts (your products or services) that can help them respond to the change the right way and ultimately reach the promised land.
- Strengthen your claims with stories from people who have responded to the change and reached the promised land thanks to your products or services.
A strategic narrative, once developed, should act as your new North Star. It’s the framework you return to every time you need to communicate something about your business to current and prospective employees, partners, investors, and customers. It’s something you can reference when designing ad creative, writing product copy, developing new landing pages, designing a new email campaign, and more.
This narrative helps everyone internally and externally feel more confident about who you are, what makes you different, and why they should choose you.
| At GrowTal, we have brand messaging and product positioning experts who help brands develop strategic narratives. Reach out if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you develop a strategic narrative that can mobilize your employees, align with your strategic direction, and bring more meaning to your products for your customers. |
Links We Love
Each week we ask our team to help us curate five newsworthy articles or events that you might have missed. This week’s top picks:
- Virtual product placement ads are coming to Amazon Prime Video and Peacock
- Google launches new ads label display experiment on mobile
- Meta commits to sharing more information on how advertisers target users with political ads
- The FTC “is considering changes to tighten its guidelines for advertisers against posting fake positive reviews or manipulating reviews by suppressing bad ones”
- TikTok launches Branded Mission, a new way for brands to partner and collaborate with creators
| Watch the video found within the TikTok announcement to see how it works |
GrowTal Expert Tip
When is the right time to start trying to scale campaign performance on the ads you’re running on Facebook? It’s a question that most marketers want to figure out soon after launching a new campaign. Here’s a tip from David Bender, one of our top Paid Social experts at GrowTal:
“Scaling campaign performance is typically a hot topic that comes up sooner rather than later for most advertisers. When it comes to new paid social campaigns, make sure you don’t move too fast or too slow. Establishing a baseline of spend and data output that you’ll always be comfortable with running is essential for training most platform algorithms.”
Until Next Time
As always, let us leave you with a quote from one of the greats:
“Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. ‘Here, open it, it’s perfect. You’ll love it.’ Opportunities – the good ones – are messy, confusing, and hard to recognize. They’re risky. They challenge you.” —Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube
