3 Lessons for Digital Marketers from In the Blink of an Eye

I recently read In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch, to learn more about the filmmaking process. Reading this book, however, has taught me a few valuable lessons.

Valuable lessons that I think most digital marketers can get value from.

Let’s get right into the first point.

Point 1: Emotion at the top of the list

For any marketing campaign or piece of content to be effective, it needs to be relevant and designed for your audience.

Emotion plays a pivotal role in the story of films, but how can this be useful when speaking around a marketing campaign, social post, or email marketing campaign?

My key takeaway was to ask myself “How do you want the audience to feel?”.

For me in particular working in the tech industry for a software company was a hard one to get my head around. How can you tie your marketing to an emotional state when talking about software?

Your customers are still buying your solution to help them solve a particular problem or to make their lives easier, you can still consider how you want a particular campaign to make them feel.

Put yourself in your customer’s frame of mind. Writing a blog post? How does this help your audience and how should it make them feel?

Point 2: Feedback

Probably my biggest takeaway from the book was around the Chapter Test Screenings. In this chapter, Walter was speaking about getting audience feedback in screening sessions.

Feedback is important in any career, especially in the marketing world, but I have personally fallen into the trap of taking direct feedback and changing the content or message based on that initially single piece of feedback.

“They will simply tell you where the pain is, not the source of the pain.”

Walter Murch, In The Blink Of An Eye

What you should try and do, is get to the root of the problem.

Go beyond the initial feedback, and find out why your customer feels this way, and you may find that it goes beyond what was originally stated.

Point 3: In your audience’s shoes

Very much linked with the previous two points, In the chapter “Misdirection” Walter speaks about putting yourself in the mindset of your audience. He was speaking about editing a film and reviewing a small section, instead of thinking about this small piece of the story, put yourself in the frame of your audience, and think about how it ties into the wider story.

I feel this is particularly useful when you are planning your next marketing campaign. Ask yourself the questions below and when planning smaller pieces of content and activities, think of how it all ties into the larger campaign and story.

“What is the audience going to be thinking? Where are they going to be looking? What do you want them to think about? What do you need them to think about? What do you want them to feel?”

Think about the bigger picture.

Final thoughts

Although not a book directly relating to digital marketing by any stretch of the imagination, it is both interesting and for me had a few key takeaways, making it easy to recommend to anyone in a marketing career.

Like with most books, however, we can all take away different things even from the same book, you may have a completely different experience than I had, but with that said it is short, well written, and does go behind the scenes of someone who worked as an editor in the film industry.

Read widely and you might be surprised what you learn.