Millennials Something Snapchat Something Something
Skeptical millennials (defined as ages 18-34) are a notoriously hard-to-reach demographic for marketers. But a new social media outlet can help – Snapchat.
For experienced marketers unfamiliar with Snapchat, it’s like direct mail, in that you can send messages to potential customers with images. But it’s like weird direct mail that disappears after 24 hours. Because it was sent by a magician or something? No one knows for sure.
But we do know that means you should send heaps of snaps to your customers when you chat. Send snaps constantly and without pause, so they can never escape your product. Just keep ruthlessly going after customers like your company is the shark in Jaws.
Spoiler alert: you’re gonna need a bigger budget.
Just kidding.
At MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 in Las Vegas, one of the featured speakers will be Scott Dikkers, co-founder and former owner and editor-in-chief of the notorious news satire publication, The Onion. Which got us thinking … what would MarketingSherpa look like if it were written by the editors of The Onion?
So I got together with one of my Summit co-hosts, Pamela Jesseau, Director of Marketing, MECLABS Institute, and we had a lot of fun coming up with the headlines at the bottom of this blog post that really, really should run on MarketingSherpa … but of course never will.
It’s an interesting exercise. Comedy, and satire specifically, is the perfect vehicle for constructive criticism. It’s funny because there is an element of truth to it. And the process of identifying the satire helps draw attention to areas (of society in general, or in our case, marketing) that can be improved.
It’s important to step outside of our industry and discover how customers see it. MarketingSherpa’s mission is to share inspirational stories of customer-first marketing. We’ve learned that sustainable success comes from putting the customer first – that means thinking like they do, even if it means poking fun at ourselves.
“Once we learned to make our customers the true hero of our stories, it transformed our world,” Dan Briscoe, Vice President of Marketing, HCSS, said in his Summit speaker application. Dan ultimately won Best of Show in MarketingSherpa Awards 2017 for his efforts, and more importantly, increased revenue 54% at his company with this customer-first approach.
So give it a try. Step outside your day-to-day, and poke a little fun at our industry. What areas of possible improvement did you stumble upon? Did it give you ideas for a customer-first marketing transformation in your own organization?
Plus, it’s whole lot of fun.
We want to hear your funny headlines!
Write your best marketing satire headlines and tweet them using #Sherpa17 by Friday, September 30 at midnight PDT. Pamela and I will pick 20 of our favorite headlines, send them over to Scott Dikkers, and then the former editor-in-chief of The Onion will pick the two best headlines.
The creators of the two best headlines will each win a free ticket to MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 (a $2,095 retail value). This way you can attend and learn how to improve your customer-first marketing in sessions like: “Leveraging the Complex (and Weird) Landscape of Snapchat: A how-to session featuring an HP campaign that generated 10x more engagement.”
Have some fun tweeting your funniest headline, and, to help you generate some ideas, here is some boring legalese about the contest.
OK, here goes, a few attempts at humor from me and Pamela…
See, director of marketing really is fun
The creative team just needs to come up with some better ideas
Event conference director books speakers she wishes she was friends with
Local man being nurtured by loving brand
Infographics retread same old data
“Yeah, but it’s got brightly colored images,” designer says.
Company builds community of like-minded individuals passionately dedicated to buying its products
Marketing platform’s latest study shows that consumers much more like to buy when brands use marketing platform’s product
“91% of customers want to be sent messages by that new technology we just acquired,” VP of marketing says.
Industry trade group International Woodland Paper Society launches new paper-click advertising to compete with Google, Facebook
Single piece of content can’t take yet another repurposing
“I’m too old for this sh!%,” blog post says.
Local woman joins conversation at urging of call-to-action
Forced blog post tries to sell tickets to event with overly clever user-generated content contest
“Our audience is just waiting for someone to ask them to do something else on Twitter,” smug creators say.
You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.
UPDATE: Congratulations to the winners
Thank you to everyone who entered. You can read all the entries on #Sherpa17 on Twitter and judge for yourself which headline was best.
However, the official winners were determined by Scott Dikkers.
Gary Jury, eChannel Supervisor, Digital Intelligence, CAA South Central Ontario wrote:
Woman seeking religious identity inadvertently converts to pdf
Jasmine Kyles, Marketing Programs Manager, CYREN wrote:
If I’m ever having a bad day I just remember that I’m some lucky marketer’s qualified lead
Congratulations to Gary and Jasmine. They each win a ticket to MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 in Las Vegas.
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MarketingSherpa Summit in Las Vegas – April 10-13, 2017
Categories: Marketing contest, marketingsherpa summit 2017, millennials, satire, snapchat, social media, The Onion, Twitter
