You know, the longer we work in marketing, the more we realize how everything is so deeply connected. It’s like when you’re putting together the gears on the wall at the Science Center of Iowa to get them all to move at once—without one gear, the rest can’t function properly.

You have to look at the bigger picture and see how all the gears fit together to drive the whole engine of a campaign.

When we speak with potential clients, they usually come to us with one want/need/ask which is often a video project. But as we dig deeper into why they need the video, it’s like opening Pandora’s box. What they think is a single solution is often part of a much bigger story.

We actually want to show this idea in motion.

Brandon has known Todd, co-owner and president of McKay Group, for about 10 years, but he’s really gotten to know him over the past 18-24 months… around the time they reached out to us to shoot FAQ videos for their Silent Sports Insurance Program.

But we’ll be honest. That was the initial ask—simple, straightforward, to the point. This is where the fun began because we switched from having marketing conversations to business conversations.

In full disclosure, conversations like these can take weeks/months/years to come up with (right or wrong) answers to. They require goal setting, they require budget planning, they require an understanding of the long-term vision.

As long as it may seem to reach a place where you know what you want and need from your marketing strategy, it’s all necessary. Soon enough, you will find yourself in a creative strategy meeting discussing your brand’s future and mapping out the tactics to get your gears working together.

Before McKay Group’s creative strategy meeting, we had already defined their 2024 campaign through conversations: Care Beyond Coverage.

But this made us ask: How do we get this message in front of our audience? As we are an extension of their team.

What does a plan look like that shows McKay is not only as an insurance provider but as a company that truly cares?

That’s what we want to focus on today. And we’re not just going to talk about making a great video or launching a campaign. We’re going to talk about crafting a narrative that speaks to McKay Group’s mission—caring for their clients beyond the coverage.

Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but the stories you tell. (Quote Source: Seth Godin)

Research shows that it takes six to eight touchpoints with a brand before a customer or a client invests in them.

So when it comes to bringing a campaign to life, you need to look at a multi-faced marketing strategy to expose people to your brand more frequently.

Our plan with McKay Group’s Care Beyond Coverage campaign was to do that through these three goals:

• Raise awareness that Todd and Scott are the owners.
• Showcase their philanthropic efforts, supporting various organizations in local communities.
• Increase brand awareness in Knoxville, Pleasantville, and Oskaloosa by showcasing how McKay Group helps local businesses beyond providing insurance coverage.

Everything that we created needed to achieve these three goals to build trust with more consumers.

So where did we start? By creating a landing page.

What is a landing page? It’s a dedicated web page that delivers a specific message or call to action, like a home base for the campaign. Basically, it’s where we direct various marketing efforts, giving the audience a clear place to engage and take action.

While that was being created, we set up an SEM (search engine marketing) campaign for McKay Group to increase visibility and attract potential customers to explore their offerings. Search engine marketing is a type of paid advertising that ensures your business’s products or services are visible on search engine results pages. When a user types in a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear as a top result for that search query.

When these two major pieces were in play, we let out a collective sigh of relief.

A big part of the legwork was done. But now comes the next phase—monitoring the analytics and making tweaks as necessary. Digital marketing is not a “set it and forget it” tactic, we want to continually analyze and use the budget wisely and effectively.

But digital marketing can’t do all the work. The best campaigns are those supported with consistent and thoughtful organic content.

When strategizing organic content you need to define three things you want your company known for so that when people interact with your brand, they know exactly what they are getting. For the McKay Group, we focused on community involvement, personal insurance insights, and business insurance insights.

One of the ways that we consistently showcase these content categories is through email marketing. It’s an unsexy but highly effective method of reaching a list of people who are already familiar with your brand.

It’s a chance to talk directly to your audience, share valuable insights and updates, and give a behind-the-scenes look at your business. You have the same chance on your social media platforms.

Here’s what we did to enhance McKay’s social media presence:

1. Updated cover images and bios to better reflect their brand story and the campaign
2. Created a YouTube channel to house their video content
3. Developed a social media strategy that aligned with their business goals
4. Wrote captions and posted content 2-3 times a week
5. Gathered data to improve the content over time

All of this can all be boiled down to one thing: taking messy action to get the results you want.

Have you made mistakes in your role? Good. That means you have more knowledge moving forward.

Sometimes it’s easy to not take any action and wait for everything to be perfect…

…We don’t have the time…

…We don’t have the resources…

…We don’t have the budget…

…We don’t have the knowledge…

Sometimes it’s easy to say now’s not the right time to do something, but even if this is true–you don’t need to have everything figured out to start.

The most successful marketing campaigns are born from action.

In order to be relevant in your industry, you must take action because, if not, you will find yourself stuck in the “go” space of a Monopoly board. To get in the game, you must be willing to take a chance.

But in doing so there will be times that you might “go to jail”. Mistakes will come and we are ready for them. It’s simply the cost of being in the game.

Each mistake gets you closer to a gear turning on that wall at the Science Center of Iowa.

In fact, we would be naive if we didn’t say that mistakes are also gears on that wall. Successes and failures both play a part in getting the gears to turn together.

Today, we hope you make the decision to take a messy action.

We hope you stop looking at everything that could go wrong or isn’t ready or isn’t perfect.

Because we believe your business is worth showing to the world, flaws and all.

To taking a step back and seeing that all of the parts are working together to tell your story,

Bangers