Signal vs. Noise—Creative that stands out from the endless scroll takes defined goals, discipline, and the right mix of analytics

The purpose of creative is to drive a lift in business. Whether working with a big or small budget, it’s important to understand what audience to reach, what message to convey, how to plan the most efficient use of production time, and most importantly—how to measure the impact. Tim Welsh, Founder of Phrasing, and travel and hospitality photographer, Zach Stovall, discuss why the right agency partner helps hospitality teams set goals, measure analytics, and design and produce the creative that best achieves those goals.

Contributors

Zach Stovall
Senior Creative Strategist, Flip.to

Tim Welsh
Founder, Phrasing

Transcript

Zach Stovall: So often when we're planning in hospitality, and talking to clients, being able to figure out how we're going to use all of the content at the end of the day is really—that sets the pace for how we shoot it, how we light it, how we approach it, the angles that we choose, the aspect ratios that we choose. It all plays into that final product. So if we're not, you know, really thinking about the end goal, then we're doing ourselves an injustice because we're just wasting time. And content production is expensive, and when you waste time, you're wasting money.

Tim Welsh: Content can be very expensive. Sure, great content isn't cheap. If people are like, "Well, I know I need video," but don't spend the time to think about every placement that that needs to be in the cases that they're going to use it. You're not going to storyboard something that's going to work for multiple things.

You'll get pulled in—as a creative—and you'll get pulled in and be like, "Look, we know we needed, like, a good shoot. They've been begging for content." But then they didn't, like, take all the notes on exactly where all that content was.

We need content for these types of campaigns, these types of campaigns, these types of campaigns. It also really helps justify the cost because it's also—it's not just it's going into one email. It's probably this is going into this many emails. It's going to inform our creative for the next six months in some meaningful way. If people think more about the cost per implementation, I think it can also help us plan more effectively.

We're thinking of cost per implementation. Well, then we're shooting this for this purpose as opposed to being like, "We had a hundred thousand dollar shoot." That's a big number for some and a small number for others that I've worked with.

But we had, like, this, you know, five, six figure shoot. How much is that going to help make us, and how are we going to measure and see that that actually made a difference? And that's where you start—you have to have the marketing team that talks about why that shoot was justified as well because this is how our metrics have risen by using better creative that speaks more to us.

Zach: You have marketers that have small teams, and so it's really difficult to be able to put the time into developing that creative, and understanding all the pieces that go into it. And then also to make that plan that really gets you in the most efficient way on on your shoot day. That's a real big challenge for the industry. And having an agency like yours that really understands, you know, how to put a shoot together that can help interpret the numbers and the metrics and also keep on brand voice and make all that package work efficiently, both for the planning and the execution and the post on the shoot. I think that's huge. I think that's a huge value to a creative team or I'm sorry, to a marketing team.

Tim: At the end of the day, always ask yourself what questions are guests—or potential guests—that we want asking themselves, and then how can we best make sure to answer those questions in a way that has some visual appeal to it? Like, sometimes stills—sometimes stills are, by far, like, everyone gets so obsessed with video.

But the amount of times, like, if you look on social media in terms of how many things are saved—and I think that saved is a metric in particular that people need to be paying more attention to. Metrics are not created equal. Saves and shares say something more than anything else. But reels and then carousels right after that—those are saved because they are heavy on information.

And if you're shooting in order to answer those things, you know that you can provide a visual to go on text about this is how we can answer things that are important to our guests, then you're going to get those metrics that reinforce that. And you're going to see the lift in your business. You're going to see the lift in that. 

And often, as marketers, what we need to analyze in terms of, like, website traffic and how they're going and how this should inform creative is, "Okay, what pages do people go to and see and get content from that are actually booking with us versus those that have browsed around but didn't end up booking?" Is there a disconnect between, like, maybe, you know, you wanna handle your UX and and fix that on the website as well.

So when you're hitting them with, like, retargeting ads—okay, this is a page that people that booked often were seeing, so I wanna get that information out there. And do I have creative that can match that, so that they can either click on the ad or save it for later or just be reinforced. They go, "Oh, my question was answered, and my question was answered in a meaningful way." And finding out what people are asking themselves and publicly to the internet and then answer those. Provide utility in a way that is aesthetically pleasing.

I want to thank Tim Welsh of Phrasing for giving us another great Thought Starter. If you liked this video, be sure to check out some of our other Thought Starters.