Category: marketing

The kirppis experience

FabrizioLeave a comment

Here in Finland, second hand is quite popular. There are plenty of shops that sell second hand stuff, mainly clothes and furniture, but also other items people is happy to pass on to someone else. They are called kirppis.

Kirppis usually have plenty of items. And yet, when you walk into one, there is no guarantee you are going to find what you need. You have to scan through the racks, check all the boxes, survey the tables and review the many shelves. The experience is often overwhelming, but it is the very same concept of second hand that makes it such: you are asking customers to give up ease and standardisation in exchange for low prices and something similar to the thrill of pulling the handle of a slot machine.

The point is, when you overwhelm your audience with facts and information about your product, features, services, what you are offering them is essentially a kirppis experience. You are telling them, “We are sorry, we could not make a decision on what is important, nor could we bother figuring out what you care about, hence we are going to let you scan, check, survey and review all of the terrific things we can offer in the hope you’ll find what you are looking for.“

Of course they will move on. You would too.

Copywriting

FabrizioLeave a comment

We all love great content and great copy when we find it. It just does resonate, immediately, genuinely, naturally. But then we either forget about it or we feel we ourselves are incapable of delivering similar work. And that’s where bad content and bad copy (and bad marketing) proliferates: in the gap between what needs to be done and what we (and everybody) feel comfortable doing.

This thread features 17 good reminders and examples for when things get difficult. Keep it close the next time you have to write a message.

In check

FabrizioLeave a comment

Most of the decisions we take are evaluated based on their outcomes. And so we find ourselves telling a story around how we chose that option over the other one because of that last minute information we got, or because of the underlying trend we picked up, or because of that opportunity that suddenly presented itself.

Of course, that is only a story. It’s called rationalization. The truth is, there is very little of rational in what we decide to do at any given time. Even in complex decision-making processes (B2B purchasing, for example), what eventually moves the needle is often an emotion, an opinion, a story better told, the friction between two parties.

How to keep the decision-making process in check is a better problem to address (vs how we can replicate good decisions/avoid bad ones). And understanding how people make decisions (all people) is essential to the career of each marketer.

Subtracting

FabrizioLeave a comment

Challenge yourself (and your team) with a question that begins in the following way: what is the minimum amount …?

What is the minimum amount of information we need from a customer before we let them download the whitepaper?

What is the minimum amount of words we have to force our customers to listen to before connecting them to a human being?

What is the minimum amount of steps a visitor to our website has to take before finding what they came for?

What is the minimum amount of words we can use to describe our product?

What is the mimimum amount of people we need to tackle this problem?

Subtracting is often the best approach.

Suspicion

FabrizioLeave a comment

Since nowadays it is possible to measure everything, we have lost sight of what is important to measure. This is particularly true for marketers.

We get distracted by metrics that have nothing to do with success. We drown in acronyms and fads that we ourselves come up with, as if we would not be enough sure our profession is still relevant. We lose track of what matters (the answer is always the customer) and we spend time doctoring dashboards that prove the validity of our convictions.

It is not by chance people look at marketing with suspicion. It is our fault.