Category: marketing

DID marketers

Fabrizio1 Comment

Marketers (but to be honest, this is valid for most business people) suffer from a clear case of dissociative identity disorder, what was once called multiple personality disorder.

On one hand, they are customers. And as such, they are for the most part frustrated and unsatisfied with companies and their services (and I mean services at large, including things such as content, information, knowledge, advertisements, etc.).

On the other hand, though, as soon as they step into their offices, they seem to forget about frustration and unsatisfaction, and they ask their own customers (both internal and external) to navigate through the same pointless odissey they so much hated up until few minutes earlier.

If we would cure this, if we would start concepting, designing, producing and distributing only the type of marketing we would ourselves be happy to consume in our free time, many of the problems of modern marketing would be overcome. And we could focus into winning people’s hearts and minds.

It’s not you asking

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You need to establish a relationship with the people you are serving, and ask them how you are doing often.

Of course, this means you might not like what they have to say, your customer satisfaction score might be low, you will have to work harder, and perhaps eventually you will have to change quite a lot of your product or service, or even get out of business.

But it’s not you asking that makes these things true.

Things are what they are, and even when we refrain from finding out – because we don’t want to know we are not liked, or find out our hard work is not hard enough, or realize we won’t get that bonus or promotion -, they will continue on their course with no regard for our preoccupation.

At least, with knowledge, we might be able to adjust just in time.

Get to their point

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The more words you use to describe what you do, the less the chances it’s going to be relevant for the person you are introducing it to.

We got used to jargon, adverbs, adjectives, buzz words, complex sentences, convoluted paragraphs, confusing language tricks and zero substance. Our brain is trained to disconnect as soon as things get too fuzzy. We lose our audience before we can even explain what it is we do.

The antidote to this is talking to the people you want to serve.

For 99% of our awake time, we are ourselves people someone else wants to serve. Yet, when our roles switch, we start believing the same things that would get our attention and money need to be made more complicated.

No one has time to waste on your pitch, save them time and get to their point.

How would you feel?

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What if you would become an expert in things those you seek to serve are interested in?

What if, instead of 20 blog posts a month you would write only one this time around? And then the next month. And the next. And the next.

What if you would have the time to thouroughly research your topics, interview experts, collect data, put together arguments from different areas, come up with something truly original?

What if your content would be the single choice for those you seek to serve, the only one article they would seek, wait for, read in the whole month?

How many visitors, contacts, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, deals would you get?

And, most importantly, how would it make you feel? How would it make your audience feel?

Openly ask

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Do you ever bother to openly ask?

A team member, what they would like to work on.

A customer, how they will be using your product.

A user, what topic would they be happy receiving content about.

Your partner, how would they feel if something would happen.

Your boss, what’s keeping them up at night.

Most of our businesses and lives are based on assumptions. Sometimes we hide them under the labels “experience” and “data”, and yet assumptions they are and they will be.

Should we instead bother and ask the question?