Tag: content marketing

Do not bother asking

FabrizioLeave a comment

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 to signal you do not trust they would subscribe otherwise.

And there’s also a bigger failure, a messaging failure. Details are presented in a long, complex, repetitive way. A way that does not belong in an onboarding. Because what it says is not “trust us!”, but rather “no refund after the trial, even if you are no longer interested, so do not bother asking!”

What if, instead ..

Your own program is ready!

We are offering a 7-day free trial, that should give you plenty of time to complete your first lessons and get going.

After that, the cost of your own learning program is €9,99 per month (charged automatically to your Google Play account).

You can cancel anytime by following the instructions in the app, and we will send you a reminder before charging your credit card for the first time, to make sure you really want to continue. No surprises!

Get started!

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.

The distance

FabrizioLeave a comment

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 that campaign because your experience and guts told you that was the right thing to do.

You have increased your marketing spend to better feed sales pipeline, investing in ads that interrupt people and are clicked only by robots.

You have changed your management team because the targets were not met.

And in the meantime, out there a potential customer is still wondering how to fix the issue your product is supposed to solve.

The distance between what happens within companies and what happens in the market is often shocking. Organisations and the people they are supposed to serve play in different fields, sometimes in completely different sports. The only way to fill such gap is to religiously do two things over time: figuring out who your customer is and understanding their world better than they do.

It is a strategy, not a tactic. And for this reason the distance continues to grow. And grow. And grow.

Graceful humility

FabrizioLeave a comment

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 made last year, how many new features you have released in the past six months.

Why should we care?

Tell us about the challenges instead, and we will be hooked. Even better, we will empathize.

If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.

Robert Mckee, Thomas Gerace – “Storynomics”

Advertising trends

FabrizioLeave a comment

A couple of considerations looking at the charts in the tweet below.

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 growth possible, even if at the expenses of social and civic well-being.

It is quite a thing that print still gets 7-8% of ad spending, despite people spending just 1-2% of their time with print. Considering a similar ratio was also valid in 2010, print had probably been seen for a while as a cheap option to spread the brand. And perhaps one that can get pretty granular (niche and lifestyle magazines) in front of a pretty high level of control (that companies lose with programmatic, for example).

Despite the attempts of innovating and the limitless potential of the platforms, advertising on digital (both mobile and desktop) is still pretty much a copy of what was previously happening on television, radio and print: interrupting the attention of somebody who is there to do something else. Nothing particularly new regarding what advertisers are looking for.