Tag: content marketing

Secret recipes

Fabrizio1 Comment

Sometimes I wonder why so many people decide to share their secret sauce online. Why should they give away what made them and their organisations successful, particularly if they are still in business? Why not keeping it all for themselves, compounding edge on competitors and alternatives?

Then I immediately realize, of course they do.

They know that 99.9% of the people that will consume their content will do absolutely nothing about it. Even when you read that to be rich there are three things you totally have to do, or that to get more leads you need to follow a four-step strategy (success guaranteed!), or that the future of work demands you to most definitely have these ten characteristics, getting to implement that requires an effort that the vast majority of people are simply not ready to put in. An Italian saying goes something like “there’s a whole sea between saying and doing”, and that is the case here. Just because you know something, even if it probably would benefit you, does not mean you are capable of applying that and make of it an habit.

The remaining 1% also do not represent a danger for those who share. The power of context, timing, luck have to be factored in the recipe, and that is something nobody can replicate. Looking back at what happened in the past and pinpoint some key success factors is easy. A lot more challenging is to be at point zero and figure out how to proceed from there towards success.

The point, I guess, is that if you have something to share, something that people might find valuable, something that might help somebody somewhere, go ahead and share away. Even your most secret ingredients are safe in plain sight.

And if you are one of the consumers of content, be mindful that things that are shared are usually a sensible starting point, but to make them work for you it’s not enough to put in the work, you’ll also have to figure out how to make them work for you.

A better marketing culture

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If you’ve worked in marketing, you have certainly experienced assembly line marketing.

That feeling all you are doing is repetition, with no real purpose or strategy, focusing on finding new ways to say old things that lost their effect long ago. Nobody really asking how you would go about solving the problem, and when finally somebody does, they also make it very clear that the urgency of the end of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year does not allow for any approach but the known, trite one.

It is a sad feeling, it’s the reason why marketers have a bad reputation, it is the place where product-focused marketing blooms. Because of course, what else should you talk about when that’s all you know and the next campaign is launching tomorrow among unrealistic expectations?

But in addition to what most of that article suggests, assembly line marketing often starts within the marketing department itself. It might still be due to external pressures, and yet assembly line marketing is a way for marketing heads and leads to keep their people busy, to avoid answering important questions, to give the impression that everyone is working hard, and eventually to keep their job.

There is a huge need for a better marketing culture, for a deeper understanding of what marketing is and can achieve. Real marketing touches hearts and builds relationships, but it takes time to plan, execute and grow. Yet, once it’s established, it cannot be unlearned or abandoned, because it’s the difference between aimless growth and change.

What you are and who for

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Few months back I got to know Stripo. I was looking for a way to spice up our internal email updates, and I wanted a tool that could let me build a compelling visual easily and with no coding.

The tool is great, there’s a free trial if you want to check it out. But what really stands out to me after having visited their website few times now, is the perfect way their solution is introduced to the world, right above the fold of their website.

Drag & Drop Email Template Builder – Simple and clear, sets you right away on the right course to understanding what you are looking at. At the same time, they are telling you they are not in the same business as other popular Saas that deal with email, positioning their offering in a very specific niche (“email template builder”). It’s interesting to notice how some of their competitors fail to do just that, because they prefer to put the emphasis on the more common and confounding term (“email”), or because they add complexity with the use of a second term (“content management platform”).

Create professional and responsive email templates fast without any HTML skills – While it is mainly a confirmation of the sentence above, this value proposition statement adds two important elements: what’s in it for me (“fast” = time saving) and why should I stop my research here (“without knowing any HTML skills” = a solution for people with no technical background).

Talk with your customers

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Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes (or in anybody else’s, for that matter) is not a great advice.

It might be a good introduction to the context and the surroundings of the customers, but eventually you will most likely end up taking with you a lot of your thoughts, ideas, assumptions, models, preferences, plans. What you will see is what you want to see, not necessarily what the customers see.

A better alternative is to talk with your customers (or anybody else you want to understand). Talk as in sit down with them, with no distractions, listen deeply, ask open questions, listen more, pay special attention to their language, their thought process, their ideas, and what they don’t say. There you can find information worth processing and turning into actions.

Take marketing seriously

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Your company is not going to win on features and product.

It is almost boring to say this out loud, and yet many still think that the fact their product is better than their competitors’ is going to give them sustainable competitive advantage.

Your product needs to be good, as infallible as it can get, and that is pretty much the basic expectation of any person who is buying anything. Even more so in B2B. And yet, that is not what is going to make your company successful in the long term.

Few numbers.

Slack went public last week, and they disclosed (among other things) that they invest 56% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Salesforce and Tableau spend respectively 46% and 51% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Out of 205 Saas companies surveyed here in 2017, the median marketing and sales spend as % of revenue was 37 (and by the way, the once who spend more than the median had a marked tendency to grow at a much faster pace).

I like the way David Cancel, CEO and co-founder of Drift (and former Chief Product Officer at Hubspot) explains the importance of marketing and brand in the Saas industry.

In this interview, he describes the current as the P&G wave of Saas. When Saas got started (the Edison wave), few companies were trying to figure out what Saas was and essentially come up with the basics. Then, the industry started to affirm (the Ford wave): a number of companies consolidating practices and growing their businesses. Now, in the P&G wave of Saas, a fast-increasing number of Saas companies (Cisco estimated there were 156,796 third-party apps serving businesses in 2016, a 30x increase in a matter of two years!) need to give buyers a reason to choose them against the competition. And the reason is never the product.

There’s no intention here to claim that merely spending money in marketing and sales is sufficient for success. It is not, as it is not having a good product. The companies that I have mentioned here (Slack, Salesforce, Drift) have excellent marketing people, that know well how to craft a strategy way before moving into tactics.

Nonetheless there’s a clear necessity for Saas companies to take marketing and sales more seriously. Marketing, in particular, is not the interns you are hiring for the summer to take care of your social media pages, nor is it the student you underpay to drive traffic and leads to your website. Make sure you have a solid marketing team that understands positioning, customer research, value proposition and all the elements of a marketing strategy.

Today, there’s no more excuses to overview this fundamental part of building a success story.