Make better marketing content by thinking about pizza

Making better marketing content – the delicious way

TL;DR

Do you want more people to consume your marketing content? Make it as appetizing and easy-to-digest as delicious pizza.

One of our clients, who runs an internal communications site for a national insurance company, once told me about their most popular post ever. Now keep in mind this is healthcare. They post stories about cancer survivors, corporate charity work, and a load of general healthcare-feel-good stuff.

Their most popular post of all time blew everything else out of the water — by multiples.

What do you think it was?

A piece about a miraculous recovery made possible by the insurance company?

A video about the staff volunteering at a children’s hospital?

Wrong and wrong.

The most popular post of all time was a <100 word blurb announcing that cafeterias across the organization would now serve pizza every day.

Pizza.

How did an article about pizza blow away other inspiring, uplifting pieces about the company making a difference in patients’ lives?

It’s simple. Because it’s pizza.

Ok stay with me. This does apply to marketing. Let’s unpack this more…

Why the best marketing is like pizza

Everyone loves pizza. It’s hot, crispy and delicious.

That’s it. The article exploded because it was something the audience naturally cared about. Not what they should care about (the making-a-difference stuff).

The pizza theory can apply to all your marketing efforts, not just company announcements. Before you make your next marketing video or sponsor your next post, take a step back and ask yourself, “Is this pizza to my audience?”

Meaning: does this piece of content serve my audience? Would they care about this as much as they would someone telling them pizza is in the conference room? If not, reframe your message because it’s not going to cut through.

So many marketers make the mistake of thinking their audience wants to watch an ad or read a whitepaper. The sad news is: they don’t. They want to watch their YouTube video, read their LinkedIn feed or check the baseball scores.

But put pizza in front of these folks and no matter what they’re doing, they’ll check it out.

Pizza is:

- - Simple and easy to understand. You don’t need a primer or any kind of introduction to the concept. “Pizza” is a schema you already understand. How can your marketing message leverage things your audience already knows?
  - Easily illustrated with imagery, text and spoken word — quickly and efficiently. It’s not called “Baked dough smothered in tomato sauce and melted cheese.” It’s “pizza.” It’s a picture of pizza. How can you illustrate your message in the fewest amount of words/images?

One other thing: even mediocre pizza is still good. In other words, your pizza-level content doesn’t need to be perfect. Because it’s in the realm of something someone would naturally like to interact with, they’ll engage anyway.

Personas, challenge statements, market research, and key differentiators are all important ingredients to making successful marketing. But you need to concentrate on assembling those ingredients into something people actually want to consume. Because the same ingredients used for a successful pizza could also be used to make something completely inedible.

Author’s note: By “pizza” I don’t mean the deep dish stuff served in my city (Chicago), I mean triangle-cut NYC pizza. Eight slices of pure heaven. 😋🍕

Editor’s note: Chicagoans who don’t have Lou Malnati’s in their regular pizza rotation are wrong.

Sleep and creativity: The most powerful creative tool you’re not using

The next time you’re stuck on a creative problem, don’t put more energy into it. Instead, take your foot off the gas and go to bed. I promise in the aggregate, you’ll get the job done quicker.

Case study: me

Every now and again I make a fun video for our agency, Umault. A few weeks ago I started another of these projects. My concept revolved around my daughters’ budding love of photography. I put my daughters in some pretty cinematically beautiful situations like sunset, blue hour, and a nighttime fire pit – then filmed them taking pictures.

My footage was pretty beautiful but once I entered post-production (editing the video), I noticed a problem: no story!

I’ve got 4 hours of footage and my initial concept (film my kids taking pictures) isn’t really strong enough to carry anyone’s attention.

So this is when I start to do the real work.

I sleep.

I sleep and I sleep and I sleep.

I don’t open the project file.

I don’t even think about the project.

I sleep and watch TV and live life.

I do this for a whole week.

And finally, yesterday, I opened the project file.

And within 20 minutes I refined the concept and a killer story emerged.

This is no accident. This is because of sleep.

Sleep and creativity go hand in hand

It sounds a little nutty, but sleep is how I do my best work. It’s the common thread through all of the videos our clients love.

And there’s some scientific evidence that sleep and creativity might work together to boost creative problem-solving.

I can’t help but think if my fun project was being done at some big corporation, the creative lead would never suggest the entire team go away and get some sleep. Instead, they’d double their efforts and make everyone pull an all-nighter to solve the issue.

Maybe this would work, but probably not. Most likely when the team finally did get some sleep, they’d wake up to see their solve doesn’t work. It’s kind of like when you’re at a party, drunk, and think you’re the smoothest cat in the world. Then the next day you see the video someone took of you, and you want to crawl into a hole.If you lead a creative marketing team, try this next time you’re stuck in a creative rut: give your people the afternoon off and have them assemble the next morning. I pretty much guarantee that within 10 minutes you’ll have your solution.

A world-changing idea has never been willed into existence. Ideas require time to develop.

I’m no expert, but I think sleep allows me to solve a creative problem 5–10 times faster than when I’m tired.

Now for the other type of energy, there’s Taco Bell breakfast!

7 ways to avoid making a “corporate” video

As things transition to our post pandemic new normal, let’s pledge “corporate” video will be relegated to the way things used to be. We’re not saying corporations should stop making videos. We’re saying
they should stop making them so “corporate.” You know what we mean by “corporate,” right?

“Corporate” video is:

Interviews with deer-in-the-headlights executives
Shots of people writing on a whiteboard
Spokespeople on white backgrounds saying stuff like “end-to-end solutions”
Testimonials with customers who look like they’re being held hostage
Slow motion people in a conference room “collaborating”
Event footage of attendees picking up their name badges

That’s what we mean by “corporate” video. Another way of saying it is bad video. Let’s all agree these videos deserve to live as only a distant memory. Here are seven ways we can make that happen.

#1 – Avoid worn-out creative concepts

While guaranteeing any particular video will be 100% effective is impossible, there is a way to guarantee a video will be ineffective. And that’s by making a video that’s been done before. Not one time, not five times, not even 100 times, but 10,000+ times.

At Umault, we use the term “Default Creative” to describe video ideas that have been done ad nauseam. They’re default because no critical thinking was done. The video idea, or creative, was sitting there in the public domain of creative, and it was used with no thought to strategy, audience, et al.

In the same way that defaulting on a loan means no payments were made, using Default Creative
means nothing new was made.

So why do brands continue to make marketing videos using Default Creative?

Because it’s easy.

It’s easy to develop, to produce and to sell through to management. There is almost zero perceived risk because it’s been done a million times before. Everyone knows what the end product should look like because they can all point to a ton of examples on YouTube.

But as Gary Vaynerchuk says, “You can’t beat what you copy.” In other words, the best your video will perform is slightly worse than the video you copied. It’s not adding anything new to the collective experience we call humanity.

Default Creative ends up as white noise in your target customer’s feed. It’s nothing. It’s the soggy, bland airport sandwich of video. It serves only to check a box. You could have gotten a higher ROI putting your video budget on black in Vegas (and had a lot more fun).

Your goal should be to make an amazing video that will become someone else’s Default Creative.

If that’s your goal, here’s how to do it: Be risky up front. Reject things that have been done before. Push push push into uncomfortableness. As Lee Clow (the man behind Apple’s 1984 ad) says, “Don’t do the right thing…Do the brave thing.”

#2 – Don’t tell a story about the issue

Whenever Don Hewitt, the legendary creator of 60 Minutes, was asked about the secret to the program’s success, he answered with four words: Tell me a story. Hewitt said 60 Minutes doesn’t do stories about issues; it does stories about the people who are swept up in them.

He said, “Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know: Tell them a story. The issue was evil in the world. The story was Noah.”

“Storytelling” has become a cliché regarding marketing and video in particular. But we would argue that less than 30 percent of the videos being produced by brands qualify as actual stories—at least, as defined by Hewitt.

Most of the video content we see is all about the issue. There’s an easy way to tell. Does the video feature boring stock footage of people climbing mountains or collaborating in conference rooms paired with an inspirational voiceover? This generic, vague footage signals that there is no clear story. It’s all just facts and figures.

So what do you do instead? Pull a page from 60 Minutes’s playbook. Tell a small story about a big issue.

Think about your favorite movie. In the grand scheme of things, the film you love so much is a very tiny story.

The Shawshank Redemption is really just about a small group of prisoners in Maine. The net impact on the world-at-large from their story is zero, yet the movie probably changed how you see the meaning of life because it covers larger issues about humanity, friendship, love, hate, and so on. It’s an amazing, yet small, story.

This is how you must think about your marketing videos. Ask yourself: What is the smallest story you can tell to convey your message?

#3 – Trust your audience

Assume your audience won’t “get it” at your own risk. If you really want to engage your audience, you need to trust they will figure things out.

In fact, it’s the “figuring things out” that makes for engaging video marketing.

People like a good mystery.

The reason why shows like Game of Thrones and Lost became such runaway hits is that they withheld information. We watched every week to find out who would become ruler of Westeros or what the meaning of the island was.

Put it this way, if Agatha Christie told you who the killer was in the first 10 pages, you wouldn’t keep reading.

People want to be active participants in what they watch. They don’t want to be spoon-fed.

As Andrew Stanton (director of WALL-E and Finding Nemo, among others) puts it in his TED Talk, “the audience actually wants to work for their meal.”

He continues, “We’re born problem solvers… It’s the well-organized absence of information that draws us in.”

Trust your audience to be smart people.

We have heard countless times from marketers, “We get it, but our audience won’t. They need everything spelled out for them. They’re CFOs after all!”

Wait.

So CFOs – people who went through years of college, climbed their way up the ranks, and now manage the finances of your company – won’t “get it?”

It’s illogical to think CFOs are too dense to figure things out on their own. After all, CFOs use facts and inference to steer the financial future of a company.

The real issue is that they’re bombarded with corporate videos that spell everything out for them. So yes, they are disengaged. And they do have a short attention span for marketing videos that don’t require engagement of the brain.

BUT… If you were to give them a mystery – or not spell everything out for them – you’ll see they’re people like you and me. They’re smart, curious and looking to solve problems. That is their job after all!

Your audience is made up of smart people who are in a position to buy your product or service. If their company trusts them enough with this responsibility, shouldn’t you? Instead of shying away from making your audience think, shouldn’t you require and even indulge it?

#4 – Avoid “Go Fever”

On January 28, 1986, space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Seventy-three seconds into the flight, the shuttle disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean. An O-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters directly caused the accident, but the investigation revealed “Go Fever” as the real culprit.

The launch was postponed many times due to technical and weather issues. NASA wanted to launch, to go. The mission slowly changed from launching a crew into space and returning them safely to going. Since the mission was to go, safety problems were overlooked because they would cause mission failure (which was now going).

How many times has this happened in your company? The project turns from “get a video that gives us ROI” to “get a video, NOW!” Invariably, this push to just get it over with yields a mediocre video.

Avoid “Go Fever” like the plague. Just like no one remembers the pressure NASA was under to launch, no one will remember the pressure you were under to produce a video when it fails. They will only remember the disaster.

#5 – Make your customer the hero

This tip is inspired by Donald Miller at Storybrand. We highly recommend his in-person course. It will change your life.

Miller’s idea is that your company is not the hero of your video. Your customer is. It sounds simple, but so many brands make themselves the hero with talk about being “family owned” or “in business since 1958.” We hate to break it to you, but no one cares.

Those chest-pounding statements ignore the main reason why the prospect is watching your video: to solve their problem! You should be Yoda and your prospect should be Luke. You are Gandolph and your prospect is Frodo. You are the guide and your customer is the hero. You are merely helping them achieve their goals.

This very simple mindset shift will help you create videos that empathize with your prospects and you’ll see engagement go through the roof.

#6 – Spend more time thinking than doing

Many folks think of scripting and storyboarding as an activity to do on their way to the shoot. They hire a video production company, set the shoot date and then dedicate a couple weeks to scripting (if they do this at all) while they are concerned about shoot logistics.

The result? A “corporate” video.

Because little time was spent on developing an original concept, the video is made using bits and pieces of videos the crew has previously seen. This mish-mash of concepts leads to a video that is either weird, hard to understand, or bland and generic. There’s no creative heartbeat. The video is essentially made in post-production using an amalgamation of text callouts to bridge parts of the story that don’t sync up and stock footage of farmers on iPads to symbolize “digital transformation.”

Instead of spending 20% of your time thinking about the video idea, then rushing into production and spending 80% of the time making a half-baked idea, reverse it.

You (or your agency) should spend 80% of the time writing and re-writing the script. Sleep on it. Pre-visualize the video using storyboards and animatics. Sleep on it. Put the video’s music on your phone and listen to it every day. Sleep on it.

This may seem like a huge time commitment, but you’ll get the final video in your hands sooner because you won’t be sending the video editor a thousand notes trying to make something work. Oh, and your boss will be happier since you’re staying on budget and getting something that actually performs.

Measure twice, cut once.

#7 – Don’t make your people act

Why do so many brands insist on making their CEOs read from teleprompters? Why do so many marketers give their people scripts to memorize?

Your people aren’t professionally trained actors. They haven’t taken hours and hours of improv classes or hosted weekly talk shows. If finding professionals who do that well is difficult, what makes you think the next Meryl Streep works in your HR department?

OK, you get it.

Here’s the good news: if you want to feature your employees, you don’t need to give them teleprompters or make them memorize lines. Trust them to be the experts they are. Your CEO knows this stuff. She leads a company for a reason. Yes, she may not know the sales sheet of the new program you’re rolling out verbatim, but should she?

Instead of having her read a teleprompter, ask her a few questions and get her off the cuff response. She shouldn’t really be in the weeds anyway – let the program lead fill everyone in on the program’s specifics. A CEO should talk about why this new program helps your clients or how it fits into your culture. .

Think about it this way. If you were conducting an interview on new DMV license plate designs, you wouldn’t interview the President of the United States. You could get his comments on what he thinks about them or why the change improves the lives of all Americans, but you can’t expect him to know the designer for each plate or how they were chosen.

Each person who appears on camera should know what they’re talking about. That’s why you picked them. And person X shouldn’t be included in the video just because you think they’ll get upset if person Y is in it and they’re not. First off, how old are we? Second, HOW OLD ARE WE???

Each participant should have a reason for being in your video and only be asked about their specific area of expertise. If they don’t inherently know the content, don’t make them memorize or read from a teleprompter – find the person who does know it and put them in the video.

“Corporate video” really just means “bad video”

We all know what a “corporate video” is – and it’s not good. No one goes home, puts on comfy pants and watches a corporate video. No one shares a corporate video.

So why make one?

We hope this quick read inspired you to break the mold and never make a corporate video again. You can do this!

We’re here to help you on that journey. Check out our B2B video marketing guide to learn how to develop effective video marketing content that drives tangible business results.

Good luck!

How to stand out from your competition: An easy B2B video marketing strategy

The easiest way to stand out from your competition is to stand out.

Thank you, good night everyone!

Yes, this is my insight. But in all seriousness, 90% of the companies I encounter don’t practice this very easy B2B video marketing strategy.

Many B2B videos I come across look and sound exactly like their competition – except for brand colors, typefaces and landing page URLs. I once showed a client their competitors’ videos and they couldn’t tell them apart without the logos at the end.

Why so many brands look and sound alike

How does this happen? It happens for the same reason why everyone wore big skater jeans in my high school in the mid-90s (yes, I had JNCOs). None of us wanted to look weird or behind the times, so we followed each other.

But in business the desire to fit in causes companies to fade into mediocrity. The impulse to avoid looking weird at the next conference leads to you and your competitors looking and sounding alike.

Your competitor makes a video with cool nodes and AI-looking stuff, so you make one. You make a video with blue text and two months later your competitor follows suit. The problem is – relative to your customers – there’s no difference between you and your competitors. You’re all blue-text-AI-node-video companies.

If you want to stand out from your competition, you have to have the courage to stand out. And I don’t mean changing up the color on your next explainer animation or using different interview angles with your next CEO video.

I mean looking and sounding markedly different than your competitors.

I mean ditching the animated explainer video and ditching the interviews with your CEO altogether.

You need to be so different that the competition doesn’t have the courage to copy you. Or if they do, it’s years instead of months later because it took them that long to see your strategy worked. (And by then you’ll be on to the next bigger and better thing.)

You can stand out from your competition in a few ways:

- What you say
- How you say it
- The visuals you use

It doesn’t have to be difficult or risky. Let me give you an example:

During a recent strategic engagement we discovered none of our client’s competitors featured imagery of the industry they were trying to serve in their videos.

Our risky and courage-needing insight? Their video should feature the target industry’s imagery since that is who they’re trying to sell to. Woah. That’s crazy.

Now this a very obvious example, and it’s not always this easy. But I guarantee with a robust competitive analysis and some mental elbow grease, you’ll be able to find some messaging blue ocean.

You don’t have to take an overly bold risk or position yourself as something you’re not. Odds are there is something you can say that none of your competitors have the guts or clarity to say. Find it. And say it!

Here’s a clip from Mad Men where Don Draper helps Lucky Strike cigarettes find their messaging blue ocean.

For Lucky Strike, saying something different was as simple as highlighting a part of their process. They changed the conversation entirely from squabbling over health claims.

What can you say, what can you show, how can you say it in a way unlike any of your competition?

Need more help?

Check out this other article I wrote called How to come up with a great idea for a B2B video in 4 easy steps.

How to easily develop an amazing B2B video concept

How to come up with a great idea for a B2B video in 4 easy steps

Coming up with ideas for B2B videos is hard. The messages are usually complex and you have a plethora of different people to appeal to. We’ve developed a simple method for developing great B2B video concepts – it revolves around eliminating ideas instead of coming up with them.

How to come up with a great idea for a B2B video in 4 easy steps:

Create a persona for your single most valuable customer
Get to the core of their problem to find your core message
Research the competition
Use the process of elimination to arrive at a video concept

Step 1: Create a persona for your single most valuable customer

Before we can even think about getting creative we have to understand exactly who we’re talking to. We need to develop an avatar, or persona, for our single most valuable customer.

Keep reading even if you already have buyer personas, because we have to identify the single most valuable persona this video needs to talk to.

Your single most valuable customer is an imaginary person. He/she doesn’t exist. It’s meant to be an average of the people you love working with who also love working with you. The customers who buy your most profitable offerings. The folks who respect your time and the way you work. These are the customers who, if you could clone them, your life would be amazing and your company – successful.

Have an idea of who this person is? If you already have your buyer personas done, pick the persona that most closely matches these criteria in the market you’re targeting with this video or campaign. If you don’t have buyer personas, you can download our persona worksheet to develop them.

Download the persona worksheet

Once you have your single most valuable customer persona completed, you’re ready for the next step!

Step 2: Get to the core of your prospect’s problem and find your core message

You’re in business because you solve your clients’ problems. Your video needs to show your prospects what problem you solve and how great you are at solving it, in one form or another. The better you are at relating directly to your prospect’s core problem, the more your video lands. The more generic you are, the more your video is like everyone else’s.

While this sounds completely elementary, you’d be surprised how many marketers assume the problem they’re solving for is the customer’s core problem when they’ve actually missed the mark. Or are trying to relate a list of 20 problems, ultimately relating to none.

The best videos focus on one core problem and therefore, one core message. That message may have RTBs (reasons to believe) that speak to other problems clients have but make no mistake, a prospect rarely has more than one core problem.

The core problem is the one that keeps them up at night. The one they really won’t tell anyone, except their psychologist or significant other.

For example, say your most valuable customer is an IT leader at a pharmaceutical company. Their list of problems may include:

- Downtime
- Data governance
- Upgrades
- Antiquated physical servers
- Cybersecurity
- Frustrated users
- Lack of agility

Any of these problems on their own are big, but they’re probably not the core problem of your most valuable prospect.

The core problem might be something like: “Our IT is a mess and I’m not sure I have what it takes to fix this.”

This problem trumps all other problems in the stack. The other problems aggregate to form this core problem. Notice how this problem isn’t just focused on the thing that is wrong. The problem is so big that it’s overflowing into the personal arena of self-doubt.

A great way to test if you’ve landed on the core problem is to see if it fits in a short sentence, under 140 characters (without commas and lists). If you can put the problem into a sentence this short and you can make a case for all of the sub-problems adding up to this core problem, you’ve got it. If you can’t, keep the burner on and distill it down some more.

Once you have the core problem, simply take the inverse of it and that should be your core message.

For example, “Our IT is a mess and I’m not sure I have what it takes to fix this,” turns into, “We give you the tools to take control of your IT.”

It really is that simple.

Step 3: Research the competition

How can you be different if you don’t know what “normal” is? The best way to stand out is to see what your competition is doing and saying, and then avoid doing and saying the same stuff.

Again, seems elementary, but there are deep human desires to avoid risk. One of the ways we avoid risk is by staying creatively close to our competition aka fitting in. This is what leads competitors to start looking and sounding alike – just swap out the brand colors and fonts.

It’s important to map out where the competition is so we can find some blue ocean and say what they’re not saying. Or if we have the same message, say it in a different way. This is where competitive analysis comes in.

Make a four column table. From left to right label your columns “Competitor,” “What they say,” “How they say it,” and “How we’ll be different.”

I recommend running at least three of your competitors through this exercise.

For each competitor, scan their website, content marketing, social media and marketing videos. Jot down the key messages you hear/see during your scan in the “What they say” column.

Next, take notes on how they say it. Do they lean heavily on their blog? What does the imagery look like? Are the videos animations? Talking heads? Write down the different key ways they say their message.

Finally, jot down 2-3 ways you’ll be different than each of these competitors in the “How we’ll be different” column. Will your imagery be more approachable? Perhaps emphasize your expertise instead of your full product portfolio?

Don’t worry if some of the items in this column contradict. We’ll sort it all out in the next step.

Step 4: Use the process of elimination to arrive at a video concept

Michelangelo supposedly said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Put another way, the sculpture was always there, the artist simply subtracted extraneous material and set it free.

This is exactly what we’re doing in this step of the process. We’re going to lay everything we’ve done up to this point on the table and start eliminating things. Once we have eliminated enough, the idea will present itself – just like Michelangelo’s David.

Take the list of How we’ll be different items you came up with and start crossing off things that don’t sync up with your core message. For example, if your core message is, “We give you the tools to take control of your IT,” and one of the items in the different list is, “Showing off our new office,” you would cross this item off. It doesn’t relate to giving your customers tools or empowering them to take control of their IT.

After you finish this exercise, you likely have 3-6 things left in your How we’ll be different list. Take those items and see if they sync up with your most valuable persona. Cross off what doesn’t make sense. For example, one of the different items left is, “use social media influencer” but your persona doesn’t go near TikTok or Instagram, you’re probably going to want to cross that off.

Ok. You probably have 2-3 things left in your different list. Now here is the fun part. Gather your team and brainstorm video concepts that incorporate these elements with your persona and core message in mind. Odds are, the concept will come to you in a few minutes if it hasn’t already while reading this article.

We let the process of elimination do most of the work for us.

This isn’t the only way to generate a great B2B video idea, but it is efficient

Do you see what we did there? For more than 85% of this process we’re not actively trying to brainstorm a great idea. We let the process of elimination do most of the work for us. Then we swoop in for the last 15% with full creative energy and use the remaining elements to generate a solid video idea.

While there are a million ways to come up with B2B video ideas we’ve found this “subtractive” method produces amazing results. It allows us to spend less time banging our heads up against the wall trying to force great ideas and delivers viable creative options faster.

Please let us know how this worked for you! If you want to learn more about B2B video marketing, please check out our B2B video marketing guide.

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