Tag: growth

Would you?

FabrizioLeave a comment

Would you buy your own product?

It’s not a difficult question to answer for most founders and executives, but there is a lot more to it that is worth asking.

Would you spend money regularly over a period of time to use your product?

Would you do that after having visited your website?

Would you move away from your main competitor?

Would you click, read and act on any one of the automated emails in your nurture flow?

Would you be engaged by your blog and social media posts?

Would you be ok with being automatically charged once the trial period is over?

Would you accept the LinkedIn invite from one of your sales rep?

Would you work for your company if Google, Apple or Tesla would come knocking?

Would you accept a job offer even knowing how things work at your company?

We should stop dissociating. We are customers and buyers in the first place, we do know what we enjoy to consume and what we spend money on.

It is a very good place to start from.

Hiding

FabrizioLeave a comment

If there is a feature or a characteristic of your product that consistently keeps your audience from buying, you have one of two options: change the feature, or change the audience.

Hiding the feature, on the other hand, is but a shortsighted and counterproductive trick. You actually want people to know about it as soon as possible, so that you do not end up wasting time with those who consider that a roadblock.

This is something marketing departments often get wrong.

Hey

Fabrizio1 Comment

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.

Why not.

In check

FabrizioLeave a comment

Most of the decisions we take are evaluated based on their outcomes. And so we find ourselves telling a story around how we chose that option over the other one because of that last minute information we got, or because of the underlying trend we picked up, or because of that opportunity that suddenly presented itself.

Of course, that is only a story. It’s called rationalization. The truth is, there is very little of rational in what we decide to do at any given time. Even in complex decision-making processes (B2B purchasing, for example), what eventually moves the needle is often an emotion, an opinion, a story better told, the friction between two parties.

How to keep the decision-making process in check is a better problem to address (vs how we can replicate good decisions/avoid bad ones). And understanding how people make decisions (all people) is essential to the career of each marketer.

Suspicion

FabrizioLeave a comment

Since nowadays it is possible to measure everything, we have lost sight of what is important to measure. This is particularly true for marketers.

We get distracted by metrics that have nothing to do with success. We drown in acronyms and fads that we ourselves come up with, as if we would not be enough sure our profession is still relevant. We lose track of what matters (the answer is always the customer) and we spend time doctoring dashboards that prove the validity of our convictions.

It is not by chance people look at marketing with suspicion. It is our fault.