Tag: email marketing

The experience

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If there’s one thing that everybody in marketing agrees on is that to effectively market a product or service you should not talk about that product or service.

And if you look around, you know that very few practice what they preach.

This video from Apple is something to aspire to.

There’s loads of products, actually there’s virtually no frame that does not feature an Apple device or solution (I stopped counting at 25 shots).

But it is not about the products.

It’s about the transformation that the product can produce in the world. It’s a story about taking a piece of paper and translating that idea into something concrete and worth presenting. It’s about the excitement, the fear, the tiredness, the anxiety, the juggling, the mistakes, the rebirths, the preparedness and the unpreparedness, the unsecurity, the will to make things happen.

Apple would be entitled, more than many others, to spend hours talking about their technology, their features, their apps, their ecosystem. But they understand that’s useless.

What matters is the experience. That’s what this ad is.

Three books

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Three amazing books about how people make up their minds that can enhance your marketing skills.

Thinking, fast and slow – by Daniel Kahneman.

The righteous mind – by Jonathan Haidt.

Influence – by Robert Cialdini.

If you read any one of these, you’ll have a much better understanding of why talking about features and how brilliant your product is will not help you boost your sales.

Keys and locks

Fabrizio1 Comment

Most people, when starting a relationship, tend to be all about themselves.

Here is what I do, here is what I think, here is where I go, here is what I like.

The hope, in this case, is to have someone on the other side of the table that finds what we have to offer interesting and that is ready to commit to it. It can happen.

The effectiveness of this approach tends to decrease as the relationship develops. And as we are not really talking about amourous relationships (though some basics are similar), even if we attempt to find more people interested and ready to commit, the self-centered tactic is clunky. Seth Godin explains it well when he compares this situation to owning a key and having to go around looking for the lock (or locks) to open.

Alternatively, we could just sit at the table and listen to what the other has to say. Understand their background, what they do, what they think, where they have been, what they like, and where they are headed. See if there’s a match, and if anything of what we’ve heard made us click, go back and continue working to make it work, until next time. In other words, finding the lock and fashion the key (always Godin).

Traditionally, the first is the way of sales and the second is the way of marketing.

I am not sure nowadays the distinction about the two departments should still be relevant (it is in many organisations, unfortunately), but certainly the difference between having the key or the lock first is fundamental when you think about going to market.

It’s the difference between being one of the many and being the only one.

Your choice.

Lost and never found

FabrizioLeave a comment

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.

Value is how, what and why.

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

Fabrizio1 Comment

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.