Signal vs. Noise—How to reach and engage new audiences using data to drive and shape the creative process

Using data to make decisions should be a given. But when it comes to creative work, Tim Welsh shares that's not always the case. As marketers commission more and more content, he says it has to be done with purpose to reach and engage the correct audiences. From understanding and setting goals to measuring success, working with the right agency can help marketers see audiences and their bottom line grow in tandem.

Contributors

Zach Stovall
Senior Creative Strategist, Flip.to

Tim Welsh
Founder, Phrasing

Transcript

Zach Stovall: Hi. I'm Zach Stovall, and welcome to the Thought Starters podcast. Today's guest is an advertising major that fell in love with film production, but quickly realized his true place was driving the creative with data. He founded Phrasing, a digital marketing agency that operates uniquely as a collective in the hospitality space. I'd like to introduce Tim Welsh. Thanks for joining us, Tim.

Tim Welsh: Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be on the podcast, and hopefully give something useful to those that are listening to us, and not be the most skipped episode you've ever had.

Zach: Absolutely, man. No, it's you're a guy that I've really wanted to talk to you for a while, and it's, it's because of this approach that you have to, producing content and deploying it. And I think it's really innovative for this industry. So why don't you tell me a little bit about why you founded Phrasing and what your ethos is?

Tim: Yeah. So, when it came down to starting my own shop—started in 2017—I just wanted to find something that worked a little bit differently than kind of how the agencies in general, but certainly agencies that work in this travel and hospitality space are. So I wanted to bring people that were kind of higher level and people that often worked as consultants or directors and got tired of being in pitch meetings and then not actually doing the work.

And so I wanted to bring them in and say, “Hey, you'll be in both of those types of meetings, but you're actually going to be doing the work.” So we kind of created this team of people. I kind of joke that we're an agency by name and collective by design, where everyone kind of has this seat at the table. We keep ourselves small on purpose, and we're able to help everybody.

And we all kind of have the same ethos of the work has to be really good, but also justify everything you do in the work—whether it be creative or strategy—with something data driven behind it. And we think that often everyone will know a little bit of their numbers, but not understanding, like the numbers that are affecting the, you know, the client or the industry as a whole and not bringing those together.

So you end up with like really good pieces, but having those really good pieces ultimately can, create a house of cards that's going to fall. And creative being such an important piece of that is—we don't think enough people pay attention to the data behind what can make creative really strong. People think that it's either just it's viral content or something, and that's not necessarily what makes a creative strong.

And there's a lot of subtle points in between there, on what you build. And we really try to focus on that and have an ethos that, like the creative is incredibly important, especially in our current landscape. But if you don't match that creative with some level of insight that's been garnered from past creative, current creative or the industry, then you're just going to make something that's good for you and not necessarily good for anyone else. Not for the client, not for your potential guest or traveler.

Tim: I had an old creative director that told me when I was 22, and it sticks with me. We'll pretend that that was just a couple of years ago.

Zach: Yeah. You don't look a day over 25.

Tim: I will take that. But he said, if you know you're not thinking about the utility or you're not thinking about what's in it for them when you're producing these creatives, then you're just doing it for yourself, and you're going to have a lot of things that look really pretty and fall on its face. Ironically, he ended up in the hospitality industry.

That was not his whole path. But when he said that to me, like, it's just stuck with me. And as we've gotten more and more data, it feels like people are ignoring it rather than actually embracing it and using that to help inform how they build their business and how they build their creative.

Zach: When you're creating content like it's easy to hit any audience, but when you want to hit the audience, that's actually going to go to your website and book a room that's way different than just trying to get, you know, a million views or something like that, right?

Tim: Oh, absolutely. Especially like, so you have luxury hotels you can look at like some ridiculous stuff that's in your hotel. You can see it hit a million views and get, you know, a lot of saves. But it's all going to people that are just saying like, “Oh, damn!” Rather than people that are actually like, are you trying to reach into your market and talk about the differentiators between why they might choose your boutique over, like a Ritz Carlton?

Are you actually, like, thinking about those aspects? Yeah. That becomes incredibly important. You're going to see some inverse relationships between, sometimes things like engagement rate and impressions. So when the social media algorithms are deciding to put you in front of more people, or they're going to continuously experiment with which new tribe you should see, some of those, you just will not be right for, because they're not your core audience.

And so you can have a really low engagement rate from them. You might have a higher engagement rate from something new, but ultimately, when they're testing you more, your engagement rate’s going to inversely go down. And that's okay. That's where we need to look at our macros of, okay, our engagement rate went down, but our clicks and our saves and our shares—i f those were all going up, then we're still getting in front of people and our content is resonating, even if like that engagement rate that people love to use as a benchmark. I don't love it unless, things are fairly steady. That might go down, but that's not the biggest piece—it's that you are getting experimented with—new, audiences and new tribes and some of those it's resonating with, and they're going to be sticking around.

Zach: Just getting people to think on that track. I think that's huge because everybody I think right now, kind of that, that following what everybody else is doing, everybody's just putting, you know, rolling everything into social media. And to hear you say that there are other channels available, especially with, you know, all the privacy and tracking issues that social media companies have had lately.

Tim: We can have a whole conversation about my belief on 1-to-1 marketing. Even if you get an email, if you're killing it, your email open rates are 30%, right, the email open or the open rates, on SMS and direct messaging from social media, are about 94%. So like they're going to look at your marketing messages.

And if you actually do, you know, social media, everything to try to move them through micro conversions into 1-to-1 conversations. And it's only getting easier to make those 1-to-1 conversations more specific to the person you're talking to. Those are going to be—that is the tip of the spear. If you were to ask me about where a lot of marketing is going and where, in my opinion, it should go.

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.