Category: marketing

The distance

FabrizioLeave a comment

You have spent resources improving your product with features analysts said are necessary in your category.

You have hired hundreds of new employees and built an organization that can sustain higher revenue.

You have rolled out a new tool because the old one was clunky and not providing enough flexibility.

You have gone all-in on that campaign because your experience and guts told you that was the right thing to do.

You have increased your marketing spend to better feed sales pipeline, investing in ads that interrupt people and are clicked only by robots.

You have changed your management team because the targets were not met.

And in the meantime, out there a potential customer is still wondering how to fix the issue your product is supposed to solve.

The distance between what happens within companies and what happens in the market is often shocking. Organisations and the people they are supposed to serve play in different fields, sometimes in completely different sports. The only way to fill such gap is to religiously do two things over time: figuring out who your customer is and understanding their world better than they do.

It is a strategy, not a tactic. And for this reason the distance continues to grow. And grow. And grow.

Graceful humility

FabrizioLeave a comment

If your story is about how good you are, how much money you make, how big of a house you own, how many cars you have, how resounding your title is, how easily your product sells, how fantastic your company is, how many employees you have hired in the past year, how much revenue you made last year, how many new features you have released in the past six months.

Why should we care?

Tell us about the challenges instead, and we will be hooked. Even better, we will empathize.

If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.

Robert Mckee, Thomas Gerace – “Storynomics”

Advertising trends

FabrizioLeave a comment

A couple of considerations looking at the charts in the tweet below.

The growth of Facebook (including Instagram) is surprising, in that it comes at least in part from erosion of the share of Google (including YouTube). That means, of course, that Zuckerberg and friends will change very little of what has made that growth possible, even if at the expenses of social and civic well-being.

It is quite a thing that print still gets 7-8% of ad spending, despite people spending just 1-2% of their time with print. Considering a similar ratio was also valid in 2010, print had probably been seen for a while as a cheap option to spread the brand. And perhaps one that can get pretty granular (niche and lifestyle magazines) in front of a pretty high level of control (that companies lose with programmatic, for example).

Despite the attempts of innovating and the limitless potential of the platforms, advertising on digital (both mobile and desktop) is still pretty much a copy of what was previously happening on television, radio and print: interrupting the attention of somebody who is there to do something else. Nothing particularly new regarding what advertisers are looking for.

From old to new

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you hear about something new, make sure it is actually new by relating it to what is already known, done, accepted in your field.

It happens quite often, in marketing for example, that a new concept is a mere rebranding of old tactics. This is done, more or less unconsciously, in part to ensure tactics stay relevant, in part to appeal to a new wave of workers, in part to protect the work of marketers (who are by definition creative and innovative).

The basics of marketing have not changed much in the past decades. The best way for you to be in marketing these days is to start from them and build your way to what is new, not the other way around.

Would you?

FabrizioLeave a comment

Would you buy your own product?

It’s not a difficult question to answer for most founders and executives, but there is a lot more to it that is worth asking.

Would you spend money regularly over a period of time to use your product?

Would you do that after having visited your website?

Would you move away from your main competitor?

Would you click, read and act on any one of the automated emails in your nurture flow?

Would you be engaged by your blog and social media posts?

Would you be ok with being automatically charged once the trial period is over?

Would you accept the LinkedIn invite from one of your sales rep?

Would you work for your company if Google, Apple or Tesla would come knocking?

Would you accept a job offer even knowing how things work at your company?

We should stop dissociating. We are customers and buyers in the first place, we do know what we enjoy to consume and what we spend money on.

It is a very good place to start from.