If you are, like me, a long in the tooth digital marketer, you will hopefully remember Hubspot’s beautifully simple strapline of ‘Create Marketing People Love’.
This has always been one of my favourite slogans as it so simple and yet so powerful. In four words, it encapsulates the very essence of what inbound marketing should strive to achieve.
Inbound marketing has never really caught on in the way that I would have liked, as a widely appreciated discipline, but the principle of earning the attention of your target audience must surely be one of the most positive foundations on which to build your marketing initiatives?
Adopting this mindset, you are forced to think hard about what your target audience actually wants (as opposed to what you want to give / sell them) and work hard to create something that truly resonates with them.
Call me old nostalgic / cynical, but I fear that the age of AI *everything* threatens this simple ambition and the result is a tidal wave of cookie cutter mediocrity?
It is so easy to create decent, but not exceptional, marketing campaigns at scale with the dizzying array of AI powered tools that are emerging on a daily basis that I worry we are losing touch with the soul of brilliant marketing.
I was therefore really pleased to stumble across a great example of what I consider to be great marketing, whilst on a dog walk…
I have no link with Grace from WiggleOn, nor was I aware of her business before last week, but she offers a premium dog walking service to customers in the Colchester area.
She has created a flyer that immediately rekindled my memories of Hubspot’s ‘create marketing people love’ mantra, as I did indeed love it. Most importantly, it is extremely well targeted at its intended audience, which is me!
It was the ‘pup quiz’ that really caught my attention. Not just because I like a good pub quiz, but because it made me laugh:
For me, there are so many reasons why this works for dog owners. It really does demonstrate how well Grace must understand dogs, as well as the lives of dog owners, e.g. the reference to “W-A-L-K’s”, whilst successfully communicating a sense of fun.
It oozes character and feels unique.
This the polar opposite of the AI cookie cutter mediocrity that I referred to above. It is often difficult to put your finger on how you can tell that something is the product of an AI prompt, but I am sure that many will agree that you do.
To demonstrate this principle, here is a flyer that I created with ChatGPT:
Granted, it is not terrible and took literally minutes to generate, but it does not stand out in the way that I feel that the ‘pup quiz’ does.
I do not hate it, and have no doubt that it could not be improved substantially with more careful consideration of the prompt, but I certainly do not love it.
If we, as marketers, strive to create marketing that people love, the world will be a better place. I would not, for a moment, suggest that you should down all AI tools, but it is important to remember that they are just tools.
Truly creative thinking still benefits from the grey cells and a profound understanding of your target audience.
Thank you very much to Grace for a great example of marketing that I am sure many people will indeed love. You have most definitely earned my attention and I will definitely be in touch if we need a bit of help with Peggy.