If you play on trite stereotypes, and execute poorly, marketing can easily backfire.
When you take it off the road, on the other hand, you can have fun with it and entertain people.
It’s mainly a matter of personality.
Tag: content marketing
Lost and never found
A while back, I was asked to express the importance of taking a more customer-centric approach in messaging our product.
The best thing I could think of was a slide with these.
Seamless and secure collaboration.
Simple upgrades at no charge.
Connecting data from across the business.
Automated business workflows.
Cloud accelerated ECM.
Security and compliance for all industries.
Secure access to complete information.
Enrich content and gain valuable insights by leveraging artificial intelligence.
Seamlessly navigate the entire process in one place.
Use groups feature to create and manage lists of members.
Rapid automation of manual, repetitive processes.
Digitize and organize business critical information.
People did not immediately understand what I meant, until I mentioned that none of these claims was from our marketing. They could have easily been, but they were actually taken from competitors, alternatives and (some) from generic Saas companies.
Now, imagine you are a customer and you start surfing around for a solution. Imagine how lost you would be by stumbling on this type of messages, and by trying to figure out which product is best for you. And by the way, no. The situation does not improve with more granular and detailed content you can find in the body of the webpage or in other collaterals.
Everybody can say they can do more or less great and amazing things. But very few manage to meaningfully connect to their audience.
If you stop at what the next time you write copy for your product, expect a result similar to the above.
The emperor has no clothes
A good portion of traffic on the internet is made up.
Voice search optimization is not as important as we thought it was.
The importance of videos for marketing has been inflated.
In the first three months of 2019, Facebook has removed nearly as many fake accounts as there are real ones (2.2 billion to be precise).
The story of cheap and easy, of “anybody can do it”, of the death of traditional marketing, of of infinite reach and segmentation is cracking on multiple sides.
We have been fed an illusion, an utopia, and we believed it because it was a shortcut.
It’s beyond time to point the finger and wake the masses of marketers up by simply stating the obvious. The emperor has no clothes.
Only if you kill it
A couple of examples of how to make advertisement in the shape of content, or content in the shape of advertisement.
Anticipated. Personal. Relevant.
Both are from the last episode of the podcast Pivot, with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.
First, around minute 19:10, during the break for commercials, Kara interviews Gavin Belson, the fictional CEO of the fictional company Hooli from the HBO series Silicon Valley. The interview is fictitious and funny, perfectly in line both with the tone of the podcast people are listening to and with the irony of the series. A perfect match.
Then, right after the break, at about 22:10, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, host of the podcast Reset (that shares the same producer with Pivot) jumps on the show to ask a thoughtful question to Kara and Scott about sharenting (parents that share the life of their kids on social media), that’s of course the topic of the last episode of her show.
There is a whole lot of space to be creative, original, interesting and entertaining with promoting products and services in today’s content-driven landscape. As marketers, we should just make the effort to understand: the channel and the audience, first of all, and the irreparable damage that gets done when instead we feed commercials wrapped in plastic to an indistinct mass of people, violently interrupting whatever they are doing.
Advertising is dead only if you kill it.
Shout
What is it that you have that others don’t?
What can you offer that is unique, difficult to replicate and of value?
What do you have to say that we have not heard a thousand times before?
If you try to get the attention with something that is in abundance, the only chance you’ll have is to shout louder. And that’s a lost game already, as you’ll always find someone who can shout louder than you (perhaps not today, but tomorrow for sure).
If instead your art, product, content, service is different, you have the option to shape your way to your audience, sit down and listen, learn, get better, make it better, and eventually establish a position that is going to be difficult to replace with something else.
It’s the power of relationships, after all.
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