Relevant advertisement is content – says Elon Musk

Elon Musk has ultimately acquired Twitter today, and made a splash entrance at Twitter HQ with a sink in his hands. We won't add our humble voice to the many discussions; yet, we wanted to quote from Musk's tweet:

[...]Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content! Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.[...] – Elon Musk on Twitter

In bold above our point. We are building a digital marketing automation platform that leverages data to create personalized touch points that are shown to users at the right time on the right channel. A big part of it is email campaigns sent to large lists of recipients; still we can't control what our users use it for, and what content they distribute.

Chris Frantz, the founder of Loops, a marketing email platform dedicated to Saas companies, got us thinking:

We believe in our mission and vision and are confident that despite much of the marketing emails sent every day is mindless product and brand promotion, there are companies that embrace a content strategy to create meaningful and relevant content, and can be supported by our automation platform connecting user data with content to personalize, target, reach the right people at the right time, and improve in time.

We are not building a tool for low relevancy email (or sms, web, WhatsApp, etc.) spam. We are tailoring a platform that promotes personalization to garner higher results and be heard. Much like Musk's intent with Twitter, only with much much less scale and impact (and gravitas).

So who are our customers? Who can benefit from what we do?

Size

Any size. It doesn't really matter how many, if any, existing users you have. What matters is the clear aim to build tables of users, actions, purchases, interactions in time, and capitalize on it. If lists currently exist and got messy, the goal will be to ultimately consolidate and make sense of the data, then put it to work for you in emails, web pages, sms, ads on Google and more.

Product type

Most of our existing and prospect customers are B2C companies selling products or offering services that grow and scale. We work with B2B customers who need a customer engagement tool able to drive conversations and campaign in conjunction with an existing CRM or ERP.

Marketing team size

We have worked with large enterprises doing most of their marketing internally, and small companies who rely on freelances and our support to build and implement campaigns across email, web and more. Either works, and knowing that most medium to small businesses will require implementation support, we partner with marketing agencies and web studios to make sure that the right people work on the right part of the campaign implementation.

Content quality

Despite having had some customers asking to start quickly with large email volumes and low list quality, no thanks. We are not into volumes of spammy content. We strongly believe in content strategy and good, relevant content that drives conversions through trust and reputation.

We have worked on digital publishing projects since 2012 and we have been exposed to journalistic values since then. We have seen most types of publishers, and we can affirm with good certainty that the ones still going strong are the most honest, content-focused, community-serving ones.

Marketing or content strategy

Both. Good marketing is good, useful content. Exception made for brand searches, most the organic traffic directed to brands relates to either how-to questions or advice seeking intents. Good marketing explains why a product was made, what's it for, why it's better than the competition and how it helps solve a problem.

Companies that are willing to build a brand and reputation will certainly look at having a content strategy. Its execution requires analyzing data and creating relevant content for different touch point types. Touch points are executed on a specific action or scheduled for relevancy, and each piece of content is placed in the right place and sent at the right time.

Elon Musk is right: highly relevant ads are content. Let's distribute highly relevant content across all channels and get to know your audience.

ReachOut app digital marketing platform

The proprietary digital marketing platform allows users to build user journeys and marketing campaigns across multiple touch points and output channels with full personalization. The system is reliant on tracking data and recipient information stored in a dedicated database in our data center in Switzerland, or deployed on-premises.

The platform offers access to a proprietary analytics library able to gather user information and interactions from multiple sources as a first party, GDPR-compliant, analytics tool. It also allows to identify users across different browsers and platforms to attribute events and actions that can further customize the user experience.

Differently from other marketing tools, ReachOut app doesn’t store any personal information, and can be customized and integrated with existing tools via an API and implementation services offered by Reach Out Labs. It is also offered to marketing agencies, integrators and platforms as a white-labelled tool to serve multiple customers with different scopes while retaining full ownership of the user data.