This post is to share my takeaways from AdWorld 2022.

Everyone who owns a business, or is responsible for sales or marketing for a business, wants to find a way to increase sales and profitability, right?

Or if you’re a marketer like I am, you want to be more effective in how you message your potential clients and optimize your marketing efforts.

It was for that reason that I attended AdWorld Conference 2022, for the second year in a row. As before, it was packed with valuable insights and good refreshers for marketing. In this post, I’ll share with you my top five takeaways. So you can benefit from what I learned, too!

1. Build a brand that people want to hear from

I’m unsure how obvious this is, so it is worth stating. At the end of the day, all companies are run by people. People who have mortgages to pay, (ever-increasing costs of) groceries to buy, and all other manner of expenses.

Let’s just state the obvious: we all work to make money. To survive, and hopefully, to thrive.

But if making money is your focus, I’d invite you to consider that you might be doing it wrong. A core principle I hold, long before attending AdWorld, is that we should all be in business to help people.

We discover what our skills and passions are, and we find companies (for B2B) or individuals (B2C) that need the item that is within our zone of genius, and everyone wins.

So how do you build a brand that people want to hear from? That leads me to my next takeaway.

2. Be personal, genuine and likable

The days are long gone of mass marketing with distant, impersonal brands speaking to many. A good read on that is “The End of Marketing” by Carlos Gil.

If you’re the face of your brand (and yes, your brand needs a face), or someone else is, whether it is an employee(s) or influencer, there are some things to keep in mind:

• Know who your ideal customer is – speak to them directly, and them only.
• Focus on how you can serve your ideal customer; speak to their need and how you can solve it.
• Be yourself. No need to put on airs or be fake. The person you serve will want to do business with you because they like you. Show them the real you.
• Be trustworthy. Don’t make promises you can’t or won’t keep. Create a culture of honesty that your employees feel and emulate in their customer interactions.
• Don’t focus on selling; focus on the problems you are solving.
• Don’t forget that you are selling emotions. (Many volumes have been written on that.)

3. Understand the platform and your audience

Once you’ve identified you who are looking to serve, figure out where they hang out online and be a presence there. If you serve multiple audiences, do that homework for each one.

Looking to attract GenZ? You’d better be posting relevant, helpful, entertaining content on TikTok and YouTube. Instagram too.

Looking to attract Millenials, GenX and older? Make sure your Facebook and Instagram presence is strong. Don’t overlook YouTube.

If you’re heavily news, trends, or topically driven, a strong Twitter presence is a good idea also.

These are super generalized suggestions to give you an idea of where to start. You may need to look at other platforms like Reddit, Snapchat, etc.

Within each platform is a unique ecosystem, algorithm and varying types of content styles that perform best. Cater your content to the platform you are using and the audience you want to reach within each.

That being said, I’m all for posting the same content to multiple platforms. It’s a huge time saver. Just keep in mind that something that originates on TikTok, for example, might not carry over well to other platforms, formatting wise.

As you post content to other platforms, do a quality check to make sure on-screen captions you’ve added are visible, post captions make sense and are readable across the board, etc. There is a lot more that could be said here, but I won’t belabor this point.

4. Gather as much first-party customer data as you can!

With changes in privacy settings with iOS 14.5, and coming soon to Google, we as marketers are having a more difficult time reaching our audiences and getting proper attribution for our ad spends.

Not to mention we are often at the mercy of social media algorithms and often only a small fraction of our organic content is seen by our audience — even customers that WANT to hear from us. (See #1)

By possessing first-party customer data (name, gender, location, email address, phone number etc.), we take back the capability to reach out to our customers directly.

Another way to put it is: in the journey that your customer takes from seeing your content online to buying from you (also known as the sales funnel), that process should take place to the extent possible within digital properties that you own (e.g. your email list or website).

Don’t rely solely on organic social media or ads to drive traffic to your website. Have a system in place that captures their information, so you can send them email updates (if they’ve opted in, of course), SMS, etc., on your terms, independent of social media algorithms that change constantly.

This brings me to my final point.

5. Test, test, test. Repeat until you find something that works.

When it comes to creating content that drives results for your business, there is no magic bullet or simple answer. Taking into account items 1-4, get started creating content. Whether it is TikTok videos that you post to Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts, blog posts, long-form video content, Facebook posts, whatever, remember this:

You probably won’t go viral right away. Maybe never. Your content might not be to your satisfaction immediately. That’s OK. Post it anyway. Don’t let perfectionism keep you from publishing content. (Gotta preach that to myself, too.)

Keep trying things until you get into a groove. Take careful notes about the responses you get to your content. Produce more that gets good results. Have a digital marketing pro do an audit for you. Keep cranking. Eventually you’ll figure out what works. You can build a reproducible process from there.

Conclusion

I hope you found a useful nugget or two from this post. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I’m happy to help if I can.

If you have anything you’d add to this, attendee of AdWorld or not, I’d love to hear your suggestions. Reach out here, or drop me a line at summers (at) summertimecommunications dot com.

Thank you for reading!