Playbooks, plays and snaps. What they are and why you need them.

So, what's the problem?

I hear it with every conversation I have with friends in the tech industry. Technology marketers today are under intense pressure to drive results and ROI from their campaigns. With increasing competition and higher customer expectations, your job as a tech marketer has become even more challenging than ever before. According to recent research, nearly 40% of tech marketers believe that driving results and ROI is their biggest challenge.

And, according to a survey by HubSpot, 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge. This puts a lot of pressure on them to create and launch campaigns quickly and effectively to drive results.

Additionally, the pressure on tech marketers to launch campaigns quickly has only intensified, as customers (and senior management) expect relevant and personalized experiences across all channels. This means that marketers must continually optimize their campaigns, monitor performance, and adjust their strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

To make matters worse, our tech marketer friends are also dealing with the increasing complexity of their job. With fewer people to get the job done, pressure from internal departments, contractors and agencies that complicate matters, and all this pressure, job satisfaction can be quite low. All this while the numbers keep stacking up.

With all these challenges, it's no wonder that tech marketers are struggling to keep up. When we asked, they said they need tools and strategies that can help them launch campaigns quickly, efficiently, and effectively without the constant hassle and pressure of the daily grind. When we went back to the drawing board, our goal was not to be another painful option for them to put up with. This is exactly the reason we created our innovative model using playbooks, plays, and creative snaps to help get better work out the door with much less hassle. By using these innovative tools, we've helped our customers streamline their campaigns, save time and money, and drive better results.

In the next sections, we'll explore what playbooks, plays, and creative snaps are, and how they can help you overcome the challenges you face with much less hassle. Let's dig in!

What are playbooks, plays, and creative snaps?

As we went back to the drawing board on how to better serve our customers, one thing we kept coming up with was the complexity marketers face when looking for options to help them scale. Traditional agencies and contractors were helping, but not without a lot of hassle, complications, and even more work than before. After many conversations with tech marketers facing these challenges, we redesigned how we work at Mighty & True in a way that centered around driving high-performance marketing, but without all the hassle. This involved creating a structure around designing, building, and launching campaigns in coordination with our customers in a totally new way. That's where playbooks, plays, and creative snaps came in. Here's how I explain them.

Playbooks 🏈

One thing we knew when building this model was that our customers didn't want to start from scratch when designing new campaigns and tactics. When we polled them about what type of programs they needed most frequently, most of them had the same requests. "I want more top of funnel leads." "I'd really like to run more 1:1 or 1: Few ABM programs," etc. When we analyzed these requests, they all seemed to be grouped around specific types of campaigns or content, each with a unique purpose. That's when we created our playbooks. At M&T, playbooks are a group of plays that are categorized around a specific purpose. These include:

• Technology campaigns - Plays that are meant to fill the funnel, announce an event or product launch, or get the brand into the market.
• Account-based marketing - Plays that are hyper-focused on a specific account, group of accounts or segment
• Video and animated content - Plays that are designed to create moving content, as video and animation is the #1 content category for tech marketers
• Content marketing - Plays that help to build more offer content

Our M&T playbooks are a group of plays put together for a similar purpose. Using playbooks, our customers can select from a menu of plays that fit a specific purpose. Our playbooks are designed to be flexible and customizable, allowing tech marketers to tailor the tactics and messaging underneath each play to fit their specific goals and target audience. This flexibility is especially important in the tech industry, where markets and products can evolve rapidly and segment messaging can be extremely important.

One unique aspect of Mighty & True's playbook methodology is that every playbook (and related play) comes with a free action plan. With action plans, we take the planning process away from our customers (a major headache and roadblock to getting more work out the door) and do it for them. More on our action planning process can be found here.

The benefits of using playbooks for our customers include faster campaign launches, consistent messaging across channels, and improved campaign performance due to the use of proven tactics.

Plays 🤺

Within a playbook, there are specific groups of tactics known as "plays." These are individual campaign executions and tactics that can be executed within a larger marketing strategy. Plays are designed to be modular, allowing tech marketers to mix and match tactics to fit their specific needs and goals. We use plays to get in market fast with a core concept, design, and a few campaign starters that can be launched fast, then added to over time with creative snaps (see below). Our plays include campaigns like:

• From the Technology Campaigns Playbook: Social demand generation, buyers journey campaigns, or event marketing promotions.
• From the ABM Playbook: One-to-one, one-to-few, or direct mail ABM promotions.
• From the Video and Animation Playbook: Documentary, animated, or motion graphics content.
• From the Content Marketing Playbook: A varied amount of offer content including ebooks, infographics, long and short-form content and the development of repeatable templates.

Plays solve the pressure marketers feel when trying to develop a comprehensive campaign but would really be better served getting campaigns in market fast and then adding to them once launched. The benefits of using plays include the ability to quickly execute campaigns with proven tactics, increased engagement due to content-driven campaigns, and the ability to mix and match tactics to fit specific goals. Plus, once plays are being developed, our customers can move on to adding "snaps" to get more into market fast. On to creative snaps...

Creative Snaps 🏆

This is where it really gets fun for us and our customers. Once a play is underway, we quickly talk "snaps." Creative snaps are our term for individual assets and pieces of creative content that can be used to extend a campaign beyond its initial launch. These can include more ads, adding animation to ads, videos, more nurture emails, more landing pages, added videos, social media posts, and other assets that can get more juice from our initial play.

One unique aspect of Mighty & True's creative snaps is the focus on storytelling and the extension of the concept and messaging used in the initial play in added ways meant to extend the life of any campaign (therefore getting more ROI from the initial play). Creative snaps are designed to tell a cohesive story across multiple channels, creating a seamless user experience for the target audience.

The benefits of using creative snaps include the ability to extend the life of a campaign by repurposing assets, the ability to tell a cohesive story across channels, and increased engagement due to the use of compelling creative content.

The mission to create hassle-free marketing

After doing this for several decades, I don't think things are getting any easier for our customers. I understand the difficulties faced by them in driving results and ROI from their campaigns while facing pressure from internal teams and outsourced help.

However, it doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it should be fun. If approached correctly, creating great tech marketing can be one of the most enjoyable and satisfying experiences you'll have in your career. That's what we're after.

Our mission at M&T is to remove the pain points of creating tech marketing for our customers and provide them with an innovative approach to help them get better work done and improve their lives overall. We have designed a model using playbooks, plays, and creative snaps that help our customers launch campaigns quickly, efficiently, and effectively without the constant hassle and pressure of the daily grind. Truthfully, it won't all be easy, but the parts that should be easy should not be hard. We have created a structure around designing, building, and launching campaigns in coordination with our customers in a totally new way, and we're excited for everyone to experience it.

Come join the hassle-free mission!

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