Tag: email marketing

Only if you kill it

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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

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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.

DID marketers

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Marketers (but to be honest, this is valid for most business people) suffer from a clear case of dissociative identity disorder, what was once called multiple personality disorder.

On one hand, they are customers. And as such, they are for the most part frustrated and unsatisfied with companies and their services (and I mean services at large, including things such as content, information, knowledge, advertisements, etc.).

On the other hand, though, as soon as they step into their offices, they seem to forget about frustration and unsatisfaction, and they ask their own customers (both internal and external) to navigate through the same pointless odissey they so much hated up until few minutes earlier.

If we would cure this, if we would start concepting, designing, producing and distributing only the type of marketing we would ourselves be happy to consume in our free time, many of the problems of modern marketing would be overcome. And we could focus into winning people’s hearts and minds.

Get to their point

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The more words you use to describe what you do, the less the chances it’s going to be relevant for the person you are introducing it to.

We got used to jargon, adverbs, adjectives, buzz words, complex sentences, convoluted paragraphs, confusing language tricks and zero substance. Our brain is trained to disconnect as soon as things get too fuzzy. We lose our audience before we can even explain what it is we do.

The antidote to this is talking to the people you want to serve.

For 99% of our awake time, we are ourselves people someone else wants to serve. Yet, when our roles switch, we start believing the same things that would get our attention and money need to be made more complicated.

No one has time to waste on your pitch, save them time and get to their point.

How would you feel?

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What if you would become an expert in things those you seek to serve are interested in?

What if, instead of 20 blog posts a month you would write only one this time around? And then the next month. And the next. And the next.

What if you would have the time to thouroughly research your topics, interview experts, collect data, put together arguments from different areas, come up with something truly original?

What if your content would be the single choice for those you seek to serve, the only one article they would seek, wait for, read in the whole month?

How many visitors, contacts, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, deals would you get?

And, most importantly, how would it make you feel? How would it make your audience feel?