Find the SMIT: Why FVM doesn’t skip this key marketing step.

Compelling marketing doesn’t happen by chance.

Strong strategic and creative thinking bridges the (often enormous) gap between what your brand wants prospects to do… and getting those people to actually do it.

B2B marketers usually know the actions they want to drive. Yet even with polished creative, they can’t convert. Why?

Their campaigns aren’t giving prospects something to believe. And at FVM, we call that something the SMIT.

Cause and effect

The idea of a SMIT — single most important takeaway — isn’t new. It represents one idea, one focused premise that captures what the audience must believe before they are willing to take action.

It sounds simple. And it’s just one link in a logical marketing execution chain. But without it, entire strategies fall apart.

Let’s examine why.

This is the series of steps that ultimately translates a business need to impactful creative production. Each step informs the next, and when you see why, you’ll understand how skipping the SMIT can lead to empty creative — and missed KPIs.

Market Factors

Consider this an overview of the organization’s current standing in its competitive field. They explain how the client is positioned, what current prospect perception looks like, and what threats or opportunities currently exist.

Example: A consultancy is not gaining traction against competitors, despite superior experience and results.

Audience Goal

In order to shift market factors into a more favorable position, your audience’s behavior must change. That’s why you should define a concrete goal for audience action — what do you need them to do? Ideally, this is a measurable achievement with a realistic, defined endpoint.

Example: Prospects more readily recalling our brand differentiation and responding to sales outreach at a higher rate.

Try to give a SMIT

Our SMIT bridges the Goal//Creative gap by answering a question:
What belief would drive decision-makers to recognize our client and respect their experts?

Yes, belief is key. Not information we want the reader to know (those are reasons to believe). And it must be a single, important takeaway because we can’t muddle audiences with multiple messages. Most viewers won’t pay attention — and those who do won’t read everything.

We know our example client is facing pressures of undersized recognition, and greater differentiating recall is needed to move the needle. Now we define an idea that will drive that behavior.

So we create a SMIT like this:
“If I had consultants like this on my team, we’d be able to launch new systems easily.”

If our audience takes away this idea — if we execute creative that truly makes them believe our SMIT, they will remember the brand. They will respect our client’s expertise.

That is, therefore, the last step of our process — creative that instills these ideas and evokes emotion underlying our SMIT.

Now let’s see what our efforts look like in reverse, from the audience’s point of view.

Final creative impact

If our creative execution is successful, the direction of our strategy will be reversed, working completely as intended.

Engaging creative helps the audience believe and internalize the SMIT. A SMIT with credibility will lead the audience to behave in ways that meet our goals. And those goals, now having been achieved, will address market factors and propel business.

As you can see, SMIT-based marketing is good in theory. Even better, it makes for a very compelling case study!

Read how FVM transformed the HighPoint consulting brand with a launch campaign that turned their team into superstars, positioning the company for a new era of success.