Tag: growth

Not a support function

FabrizioLeave a comment

Don’t go to marketing with tasks. Go to marketing with ideas.

As marketing owns many of the communication channels of a company, marketers often find themselves swamped with (last minute) requests to push out this or that message. An upcoming webinar. The latest integration. A landing page. A logo to add somewhere. The next newsletter.

Approach marketing with ideas, instead. Ideas are broader, they give marketers the possibility to prioritise, plan, create. They stimulate ownership and foster better organization.

Marketing is not a support function.

Give before you ask

FabrizioLeave a comment

You have to give before you can ask.

Lead with your expertise, your point of view, your research, your data, your guests, your knowledge before you actually ask to sign up. Even better, never ask. Set up a vision for your world so unique and appealing that people will want to be part of it without you even having to ask.

Sometimes you might get lucky. You might have people onboard before you have to do anything. That “free trial” banner might get enough curiosity for it to actually have an impact on your top line.

But don’t let luck misdirect you.

You have to give before you can ask.

Being fair

FabrizioLeave a comment

A big problem with offering $85,000 for a position budgeted at $130,000 is that very soon the person to whom you are offering the position is going to find out (even if you do not tweet about the whole situation).

And when they do, two things will happen.

First, they will feel cheated, demotivated, disengaged. They won’t be able to perform at their best, because nobody does when the counterpart sees the relationship as a mere transaction.

Second, they will start spending most of their resources to be paid what it is fair for them to be paid, whether that is at the company or somewhere else.

Was the hustle worth it?

What do they care about?

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you think of differentiating from the competition, whether it is for a product or a job application, the question you should focus on is:

What does my customer most care about?

You might be absolutely the best at doing something, have more vision than anyone else in the market, be the cheaper option. But if that’s not THE critical thing for your customer, you will lose nonetheless.

And perhaps your customer still does not know that your uniqueness is something they will greatly benefit from.

In this case, you have a choice to make: you can try to educate them or you can leverage their emotions with a powerful story of how the future looks like.

Educating very rarely works.

One piece is many pieces

FabrizioLeave a comment

A piece of content is many pieces of content.

A webinar is a webinar, and it is also a blog post, short clips for social media, multiple banners for different campaigns, an infographic with insightful numbers.

A case study is a case study, and it is also multiple blurbs for your landing pages, a script for a video explainer on the impact of your product, copy for campaigns, testimonials for your social posts.

A video tutorial is a video tutorial, and it is also a blog post good for people trying to figure out what your product can do, screenshots for a knowledge base article, on-boarding content for new employees.

The reason why you need a content engine is not to produce more content, but to make the most out of the content you already have or are about to have.

That’s what makes the difference.