Tag: advertising

Specific

Fabrizio1 Comment

Would you rather buy services from:

  1. A company that promises to improve your workforce efficiency;
  2. A company that promises to reduce the lead time of your projects by 10%;
  3. A company that promises to digitalize your paperwork and automate some of the most tedious of your processes, therefore reducing lead time of your projects by 10%;
  4. A company that promises to give your project managers the tools to digitalize the documents coming from customers and partners, to ensure they move through project lifecycle with digital assignments and approvals, and produce an exact report of what was done, when, by whom useful both for the customers and for your internal finance department. All of this, estimated to reduce lead time of your projects by 10%.

It is a matter of specificity, of course.

There is no difference between product 1, 2, 3, and 4. What changes is the level to which the company providing the service demonstrates to know what you are dealing with day after day.

Moving from option 1 to option 4 requires more data, more research, more effort. And to motivate the investment, just survey some of the websites of your competitors and alternatives: how many belong in every category? A fairly common situation is: 80% use option 1; 15% use option 2; 4% use option 3; 1% use option 4.

So, does being specific pay?

Elsewhere

FabrizioLeave a comment

Things that will make people stop listening and move their attention elsewhere.

Raising your voice.

Interrupting.

Antagonizing.

Being self-important.

Imposing your own topic.

Using more than three items in a list.

Not making pauses.

Technical jargon.

Not letting the other speak.

Getting distracted.

No form of personalization.

It does not matter if your idea is the best in the world, if you do any of the above you stand no chance to make an impact. Thinking about how many organisations out there have at least five of these dealbreakers in their communication on a regular basis.

Mess

FabrizioLeave a comment

What HBO is doing with their streaming offering is the perfect example of how bad marketing can ruin a great product.

Having three brands (HBO Max, HBO Go and HBO Now) to essentially serve the same audience has created a lot of distraction and confusion, and it has not helped one bit in delivering the image of quality HBO is recognized for worldwide.

They will fix it sooner or later, and they will most likely get past it, because they are HBO. Your organisation, though, is not. Take marketing seriously.

Brand

FabrizioLeave a comment

A part of marketing is generating sales. And a part of marketing is fostering brand.

There are some myths around this that should be debunked.

Starting with the fact that the two things are separated and can live independently. Perhaps that is true in the short term, but building a business is a long term effort, and eventually brand and sales need to go hand in hand. Brand is what gets you your best-fit customers after all.

Then, there is the idea that sales is (mainly) for the early stages of a company, and brand is for when a company already controls a certain share of the market. This is a belief that comes from an era (and we are talking about probably 10-15 years ago) when markets featured a bunch of players (say between 10 and 50 – now there are hundreds, thousands in some cases). It is also backed by the assumption that investing in brand is something only bigger companies can afford, probably because when talking about brand one thinks at tactics.

Finally, there are many who argue that generating sales is infinitely more measurable than fostering brand. And there is some true to it. But of course, the reality is that most sales-focused activities end up being not measured, mismeasured, unoptimised, and eventually most organisations just throw money at a problem without really understanding what is going on. And on the other hand, we still get emotional in front of marvellously crafted brands and often decide to buy A instead of B in the heat of the moment.

So, perhaps instead of saying that a part of marketing is generating sales and a part of marketing is fostering brand, we could say that marketing is both.

The sooner we get to look at the two things together, the sooner we will stop wondering why the 105th whitepaper is not driving pipeline or why the new logo is not resonating with our audience.

That is a waste of time.

Mantra

FabrizioLeave a comment

This is a mantra worth reminding, as marketers seem to forget it all the time.

No one wants to hear about your product.

And there are beautiful examples of what can be achieved when this becomes an assumption underlying your content strategy.

It also works, by the way.