Take control of your marketing future

Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #54 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

I hope you’ve had a good week.

Before we get to it, a last reminder that we’re currently recruiting a Digital Strategy Lead - do you know someone who might be interested?

Come and join these lovely guys, have lots of fun and do the best work of your career.

Find out more here, but be quick - applications close on Sunday!

Anyway, on with today’s newsletter - who owns your marketing potential?

👉 By the way, if you’ve missed previous newsletters you’ll find them here.

📩 And if you’ve been forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

At the end of the day, we’re all squatters 🏡

I had a horrendous landlord at uni.

Uncontactable, he’d ignore our requests when everything broke.

No heating 🥶 no oven 🤤 no washing machine 👃

There was very little we could do about it. When you’re renting, you’re at the mercy of whoever owns the house.

That metaphor extends to marketing:

You own some spaces, and you rent others.

Over the last week, we’ve been guiding clients through some uncertain times in the social media landscape.

The TikTok ban, the Instagram profile re-design, and some up and down performance.

As well as making a plan, we remind everyone that we’re only renting those spaces.

They are owned by someone else.

We can’t control the changes, and things can turn upside down in the blink of an eye.

The answer:

Diversify across channels, and prioritise your owned spaces.

The most important of all being email marketing.

Here’s the thing about email: it’s like having a direct hotline to your audience. No algorithm’s going to bury your message because you didn’t post at 7:03pm sharp or because you used a “banned” hashtag. It’s just you and their inbox. Personal. Reliable.

Social media should be your holiday home, not your home base. It’s where you grab attention, before moving people to your email list.

So how do you get people to jump from your Instagram bio to your email list?

Bribe them. Not with cash (sadly), but with value.

Our biggest advice when it comes to email marketing is to productise your offering.

Avoid “Sign up to hear the latest news”.

This might be hard to hear, but no one cares about your brand enough to simply sign up for news.

Instead, package your unique value - the thing you have to offer that very few others do - and create something that feels more like a product than a piece of marketing.

Take this newsletter.

I could have said “sign up and we’ll keep you up-to-date with the latest news from the neighbourhood” and I could send you an update of our week.

I bet you wouldn’t read it as much as you read this?

You certainly wouldn’t have made it down 25 lines and still be reading.

So what does your brand offer, that provides incredible value to your audience, in a way that very few people can? Turn that into a well positioned email product.

That’s all for this week.

I’m in Disneyland next Friday ✨ so may not get to a newsletter, but if I don’t - see you in a fortnight.

✌️

What we’re looking at 👀 and listening to 👂

📺 Dan watched the final episode of Silo season 2 - and loved it! Season 2 was actually a big improvement on season 1. AppleTV+ is bringing out some bangers recently.

Before you go - we’ll never use these newsletters to directly sell you our services, but we’re always here if you need any expertise or support 👍