Tag: content marketing

A question worth asking

FabrizioLeave a comment

There’s a question you can ask (yourself or your team) every time you are working on a piece of copy to communicate your brand, your product, your company. Say, for example, you are working on the copy for the hero of your website. The question is:

How many companies could claim exactly this?

We believe in making people’s life easier.

Powering digital transformation.

Shape the world we live in.

Smarter business tools for the world’s hardest workers.

The best customer experiences are built with ______.

All-in-one inbound marketing software.

Help Desk software for personal and connected customer service.

Fastest and easiest way to invoice your clients.

Search 1,346,966,000 web pages.

The search engine that doesn’t track you.

Connect to your customers in a whole new way with the world’s #1 CRM platform.

Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

FabrizioLeave a comment

How much do you have to insist before your customers say “yes”?

My bank sends me a text every day to tell me there’s a message for me in eServices, regarding changes to Terms and Conditions. I should go there, read it and approve it.

I still haven’t done that.

Facebook sends me daily updates of what my friends are sharing on the platform. I should re-install the mobile app and do not miss any of it.

I still haven’t done that.

LinkedIn has a new offer every other day to make me go back to Premium. I should take it, as it is unprecedented, and enjoy all the benefits (?) of their premium offer.

I still haven’t done that.

While navigating the net and Facebook (desktop), I get targeted with ads of cars that are nowhere close to the league of cars I am interested in. I should really check it out, and perhaps consider a lifestyle change.

I still haven’t done that.

Dumb repetition can get annoying pretty quickly. It breaks trust and it lowers the expectation of you actually having something interesting to say. And perhaps, like Bart and Lisa, eventually you get a “yes!”. Does that sound like a victory?

If you have to repeat yourself too much before inspiring action, you have either the wrong message or the wrong audience. Making it louder won’t help your case.

Features vs value

Fabrizio1 Comment

I got recently reminded of how difficult it is to take the perspective of the customer when you are trying to sell your product.

We were going through an exercise aimed at understanding what is the value our product delivers in front of certain pain points our target customer is facing. This was the pain point.

Uncertainty on whether people in the team are working under the most recent procedures or under outdated ones.

Right away, I listed the following under the “value” column.

Knowing that everybody in the team is working under the most recent procedures.

Then a colleague rightfully pointed out that was not a value, rather it was a feature of our product, something we were able to ensure with our solution.

The value, in this case, as we worked it out together, ended up being this.

Avoiding fines and delays due to having part of the team working under outdated procedures.

This is more measurable (fines and delays can be quantified), and it is more relatable for the prospect customer.

It was a great exercise, one that should periodically be organised across departments. On top of it, try to allocate time and resources to regularly interviewing customers and prospects about the pains they were feeling when they first got in touch with you. With these information on our side, it is possible toavoid talking only about what matters to us in the next campaign.

A reminder

FabrizioLeave a comment

What would be of your marketing if tomorrow you would be left without behavioural information, pixels, tracking, preferences, and so on?

Just a reminder that the tools you use today to deliver your message are just tools. Much more important is what’s behind that: what you stand for, what your customers stand for, what your products stand for. Once you have that clear, the rest will come no matter what.

On-demand advertising

FabrizioLeave a comment

I am shopping for a new car, and only today I spent a couple of hours looking for a good option for my family and myself.

With all the content and ads we are exposed to nowadays, I find it puzzling that there is no single space on the internet where I can go, say what I am looking for and get a number of customised (i.e., based on the needs and wants I would state) offers from different dealers.

We have been sold the idea of behavioural advertising (i.e., ads based on where I have been and what I have done on the internet) and of contextual advertising (i.e., ads based on where I am on the internet). Businesses got lazy, and forgot about the arts of asking and (really) listening.

Of course, when you ask and listen, there are two things happening that possibly get businesses (and marketing departments) into troubles.

First of all, you have to deliver. On-demand advertising would mean that when the customer expresses their needs and wants, you need to have a single matching offer to meet those (rather than having a range of offers that may bend customer’s needs and wants).

Second, you have to be the best. While many different businesses can ran ads on the same topic and find solace in some more or less meaningless metrics (reach, impressions, engagement, click-throughs, conversions, and so on), on-demand advertising would have one winner only. The one who gets the deal.