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 … Continue reading Mess
Tag: content marketing
Data
Data is everywhere these days, that also means we got accustomed to looking at data to find meaning in situations that are difficult to interpret. And so, if you present numbers or percentages, be aware of two things. First, if that is all you have to say, people will get bored fast. If you do … Continue reading Data
Brand
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 … Continue reading Brand
Simplify
This is a very well crafted video that tells of how ahrefs went about redesigning their home page. It is about the company, but it is not about the product. It is something the target audience wants to know about (web page redesign). It has a twist right at the beginning (the 3 copywriters) that … Continue reading Simplify
Do not bother asking
If at the end of a fairly long and ambiguos onboarding, you are displayed the following message, chances are you are going to abandon the product and never come back. Of course, there's the fact that automatically charging the customer's credit card after a free trial period is a truly bad practice, and a way … Continue reading Do not bother asking
Mantra
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.
The distance
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 … Continue reading The distance
Graceful humility
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 … Continue reading Graceful humility
Advertising trends
A couple of considerations looking at the charts in the tweet below. https://twitter.com/markrhill/status/1282076766161567746 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 … Continue reading Advertising trends
From old to new
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 … Continue reading From old to new
