Focus is one of the most important things if you want to drive meaningful change. It can be trained.
Sit down thirty minutes and do your work. No distractions, no breaks, no walks to the kitchen for a snack or a glass of water, no telephone in sight, no notifications on the computer. Just plain and simple work. Do that for one day.
Then do fourty-five minutes the next day, sixty minutes the following, and ninety minutes on the fourth day. Between sixty and ninety you will find your limit. Take note and commit to sitting down, every day, and doing your work for that amount of time with no interruption or distraction. When the time is over, go on a break for ten-fifteen minutes, then back to work for the same amount of time. You should be able to do that for four to six times each day.
If you do not like your job, the work that needs to be done, sitting down at your desk, taking coffee with a colleague, having that difficult conversation. How do you expect the next promotion to change all that?
If you do not feel happy in your relationship, hate to spend time together, fear the moment something important needs to be discussed, prefer to go on vacation with anybody but your partner. How do you expect the upcoming wedding to change all that?
If you are not up for practice, choose a lazy afternoon in over a run in the park, forget to bring your equipment to training, do not listen to your coach when they advise you, follow your very own personal diet. How do you expect the next personal best to change all that?
We put too much emphasis on milestones, but milestones are nothing more than the sum of the various moments you have lived to get there.
Some products manage to make the internet buzz at launch, and that has certainly been the case with Hey.com, the new (subscription based) e-mail service by Basecamp.
I am probably not the right audience for it, and still there are three things they have done wonderfully. Three things marketers (and entrepreneurs) can learn from.
They have started with a manifesto. Hey is not a mere product, it is a way of life. A philosophy, as they put it. And that is just what you need when you are trying to refresh something everybody else is giving up for dead. They have plenty of bold statements in their manifesto (“they let email down”, “you don’t use Hey to check your Gmail account, you use Hey to check your Hey account”, “it’s time to push back”), and by being bold they are carving their own audience.
They present features in a way that is pleasant to watch, read and navigate. The animated pictures leave little to interpretation and get straight to the point. The language they use is easy to understand and relate to (“fix bad subjects withouth busting threads”). They address possible common questions instead of wasting space describing their technology. And you can use arrows to surf through the different features.
And finally, they have made the decision to let you try their product with no barriers (no credit card needed and no automatic charge after trial period). When you trust what you offer, you do not need to resort to tricks to inflate success.
Of course, the most important thing is that all of this (and much more) is consistent with a narrative Hey is building around its product. Other email services are old, clunky, shady, untrustworthy; we are new, simple, honest, empowering. Pick us.
Here in Finland, second hand is quite popular. There are plenty of shops that sell second hand stuff, mainly clothes and furniture, but also other items people is happy to pass on to someone else. They are called kirppis.
Kirppis usually have plenty of items. And yet, when you walk into one, there is no guarantee you are going to find what you need. You have to scan through the racks, check all the boxes, survey the tables and review the many shelves. The experience is often overwhelming, but it is the very same concept of second hand that makes it such: you are asking customers to give up ease and standardisation in exchange for low prices and something similar to the thrill of pulling the handle of a slot machine.
The point is, when you overwhelm your audience with facts and information about your product, features, services, what you are offering them is essentially a kirppis experience. You are telling them, “We are sorry, we could not make a decision on what is important, nor could we bother figuring out what you care about, hence we are going to let you scan, check, survey and review all of the terrific things we can offer in the hope you’ll find what you are looking for.“
We all love great content and great copy when we find it. It just does resonate, immediately, genuinely, naturally. But then we either forget about it or we feel we ourselves are incapable of delivering similar work. And that’s where bad content and bad copy (and bad marketing) proliferates: in the gap between what needs to be done and what we (and everybody) feel comfortable doing.
This thread features 17 good reminders and examples for when things get difficult. Keep it close the next time you have to write a message.
17 tips for great copywriting:
— Harry's Marketing Examples (@GoodMarketingHQ) May 6, 2020
You've got this 