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.
Some products manage to make the internet buzz at launch, and that has certainly been the case with Hey.com, the new (subscription based) e-mail service by Basecamp.
I am probably not the right audience for it, and still there are three things they have done wonderfully. Three things marketers (and entrepreneurs) can learn from.
They have started with a manifesto. Hey is not a mere product, it is a way of life. A philosophy, as they put it. And that is just what you need when you are trying to refresh something everybody else is giving up for dead. They have plenty of bold statements in their manifesto (“they let email down”, “you don’t use Hey to check your Gmail account, you use Hey to check your Hey account”, “it’s time to push back”), and by being bold they are carving their own audience.
They present features in a way that is pleasant to watch, read and navigate. The animated pictures leave little to interpretation and get straight to the point. The language they use is easy to understand and relate to (“fix bad subjects withouth busting threads”). They address possible common questions instead of wasting space describing their technology. And you can use arrows to surf through the different features.
And finally, they have made the decision to let you try their product with no barriers (no credit card needed and no automatic charge after trial period). When you trust what you offer, you do not need to resort to tricks to inflate success.
Of course, the most important thing is that all of this (and much more) is consistent with a narrative Hey is building around its product. Other email services are old, clunky, shady, untrustworthy; we are new, simple, honest, empowering. Pick us.
Why not.
How do you communicate with your team? This is an excellent example.
That does not mean you have to be a mum and make jokes about the smell of your child’s nappies. It’s about understanding the situation, being able to show your vulnerabilities and reminding yourself that literally no one in your team (whether it’s 5 or 5 million people) expects you to be a god-like creature with all the answers to all the questions.
The idea that as leaders we are flawless, unwavering and enlightened is out-of-date and makes more harm than good day after day. It’s time to promote new types of leadership. And already it feels we have been talking about this forever.
If you have not yet, now it is a very good time to reach out to your colleagues and team members and ask how they are doing and what they need.
Perhaps initially this work-from-home-with-social-distancing-and-home-schooling-during-a-pandemic sounded like a nice turn of event, something that could help people refocus and companies reorganize e restrategize. More than two months into this, the reality is very different.
So, here is a list of question to start asking consistently during work days. Whether you are one or not, act as a leader, because that’s what people need right now.
P.S.: here is a good example of what a true leader does when they are guided by empathy.
Nobody gets really excited when you do things that everybody else (in your field, in your company, in your circle) is doing. And so, often getting noticed means going out of the boundaries that tradition and habit impose.
It’s never easy. For example, for someone to craft a “What’s new” page for a Saas company that makes people actually want to stop by and read must have been a hell of a nightmare.
And a hell of a fun.
It was certainly worth it.
You've got this 