Dapper - the demand agency

Mirror, mirror on the wall, which prompts deserve a skill at all? Watch the video and find out ✨

This is a rough visualization of how I work when I'm strategizing for a client. It's never actually this tidy, though. However, one thing for me is very clear: the goal comes first, always. After that it's judgment: what matters for this particular client, what I can skip, what order it goes in. Two clients with the same goal still end up going down different roads, depending on their business, their history, what their team can realistically handle, and how we can make the difference for them. As always with flowcharts and templates, I always find them quite simplified and in need of your own sauce. Yet, it's a starting point (and hopefully, inspiration). Again, most of the time I'm mixing and matching, dropping boxes, doubling back halfway through. It's my favourite type of puzzle.

I still see too many marketers making decisions based on their own taste instead of their audience's. Yesterday a client looked at one of my ads and said "I don't think I would ever click on this." And in my head I thought: cool, but you are approximately 60.000 kilometres away from your target audience…. Separating what you personally find appealing from what actually resonates with your ideal customer is something I still see people in marketing struggle with. And yes, human expertise and creative instinct 10000% matter because marketing is not an exact science. But gut feeling should never replace the data that is already sitting there waiting to be used. Your ad hooks, your creative performance, your CTRs, they are all telling you exactly what your audience responds to. Even when the answer is boring or when the winning creative is the one you personally found most boring in the review. So my mantra for my fellow creative marketing kings and queens today: guide more with data and less with preference. 🧘🏻♀️

Marketers are feeling a lot of AI anxiety right now. There’s a whole industry that benefits from that anxiety. When you’re afraid of falling behind, every new AI tool feels urgent, and every AI consultant sounds like the answer. Two important things to know: 1. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗻𝘆 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝘄𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀. AI keeps developing: what’s new and shiny today will be outdated next month. You need a system to discover and implement, not one tool. 2. 𝗡𝗼 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀. The people in your business who understand your process best (without AI) need to be involved in making it better/faster/autonomous with AI. This is how we’ve structured it at Dapper. We have five teams: Strategy, Content, Performance, Creative and Operations. On each team, we picked one person who knows that team’s processes well and is curious. This person became the “AI Pioneer Lead” for their team. The AI Pioneer leads get dedicated time every week to review every process in their area and figure out how AI can make it better, faster, or fully autonomous. Two technical AI experts support them from outside the teams and help build whatever needs building. Together they learn, test, and implement new solutions, and then train the rest of the team to use them. Hope this post saves some marketers a few consultancy costs ;)

When I started running Dapper's performance marketing channels I had one vision in mind: Keep it simple and focus on the 'boring' fundamentals. This is what that looks like per channel: 1/ LinkedIn Ads = Maximizing ICP reach & frequency to get noticed by in-market buyers and get remembered by out-market buyers. Mindshare = Marketshare. 2/ Google Ads = Maximizing impressions share for relevant non-brand high-intent category / solution oriented keywords. 3/ ChatGPT Ads = No proven playbook yet, so we maximize test & learn velocity. we launched two weeks ago and so far: 5 leads and a lot of learnings. What I stopped doing: → Launching new campaigns every month to show activity → Optimizing for metrics that look good in a report but don’t build pipeline → Changing strategy every quarter because results didn’t show up in week three There's still a lot of opportunity to grow and it's boring but it definitely works, just the fundamentals done well and consistently. What’s the most ‘boring’ thing in your marketing that’s doing the heavy lifting?

Most B2B companies are scared to invest in marketing. They're traditionally very relationships and sales driven. So they build big sales teams and tiny marketing teams, then wonder why marketing isn't building pipeline. Then they judge marketing on the same short-term KPIs as sales. Quarterly lead targets. That pushes the team into short-term tactics, while the biggest thing marketing can do takes longer and is harder to measure: building a brand buyers trust. On top of that, everyone scrutinizes the work. Because everyone has an opinion on marketing, right? I've seen CFOs, CEOs and salespeople all give their opinion. "I don't love this color." "Shouldn't we be on TikTok?" The result is a watered-down consensus. not very effective. So if you want marketing to work in a sales-driven business: → Invest in marketing the way you invest in sales. → Hire the best marketers (or agency) you can → Judge marketing on a longer timeline than sales → Let the experts do their work