HNW’s Message-First Marketing. It’s SICK!

Guess what – the medium isn’t the message. The message is the message.

That Marshall McLuhan’s got a lot to answer for. He told us “The medium is the message” in 1964. That the channel is more important than the meaning or the content of the message.

He was wrong.

Anyone can send a tweet. Post on Facebook. Fire out an email. Broadcast. But broadcast, unless you’ve given due consideration to the who, what, why – the message, is exactly that – broad. And it’s shallow too. A dusting of visibility that melts in minutes. 24 minutes according to Hootsuite.

So isn’t it weird that of the 75% of B2B businesses that market on Twitter so many simply broadcast? Not really. You’ll see it all across business comms – impatient marketing diving in, giving it the big ‘we are’ before they’ve given their message proper consideration.   

No, if you want your channels to really connect then you need to do what needs to be done. You need to put in the marketing hard yards. You need a deep and deeply empathetic appreciation of your audience. You need to make the ‘what’s in it for me?’ ultra vivid. You need to do that repeatedly, conversationally and helpfully. And you need to test your work to see the messaging that’s working best. 

The fundamentals of effective copywriting, it’s the kind of work we do for clients all across their digital marketing, however we’re applying it – through webcopy, email marketing, social. Irrespective of the channel the message is the message and you need to get it right.

It’s exactly what we did for Creative North – taking a brand new conference from standing start to stellar success and it’s exactly what we’re doing for SICK! Festival.

Are you a SICK! Festival follower? If not, you will be soon. It’s an amazing thing.

For three wonderful weeks across Sept and Oct SICK! Festival is making Manchester the world-wide focal point of original commissions, UK and world premieres covering disability, death and end of life, young people and mental health. A city-wide takeover across the transport network, shops, galleries, theatres, community venues all working together to ask:

What is the value of a life? 

With leading international comedians, dancers, performers and filmmakers, 70ish events planned, and some of Manchester’s finest venues hosting there no shortage of stories to tell or excitement to share. 

But instead of just confetti gunning that information out through the channels we’ve taken a long hard look at the underlying festival themes and the organisations, influencers and audiences those themes best apply to and who should be included in the outreach. For example”:

• Perceptions and Representations of Disability in Society 
• Talking about Death; End of Life Communication 
• More than a Score – Expectation and Pressure on Young Lives

We’ve created chopupable cornerstone copy that we’re repurposing across social media and email + Influencer packs for each theme, including:

• Intro email
• Sample tweets
• Sample posts
• Visual assets

Planned, scheduled, strategic. 

And because we know that tweets with a GIF get 55% more engagement and that tweets with video attract 10x as much engagement guess what we’ll be including?

Want to know more about how our SICK! message-led digital marketing can help your business?

Drop us a line.