It would be liberating if we would all spend less time trying to convince others and more time trying to reach out to those we have an affinity with, and then expand from there.
Growth is rarely forced upon. Telling without listening will cover only a small part of the story.
When you are on the market to buy a house, and you start going around to see some of them, you will probably feel better about those who have furniture in it. Even when you actually plan to get rid of everything and bring your own furniture in.
An empty house is often difficult to imagine with actual life in it. It takes people a huge extra effort to visualise closets, carpets, curtains, chairs, tables, lamps, and so on.
A lot of B2B marketing nowadays feels like an empty house. Huge potential, but what am I going to put in this room? Will a bed fit in here? Will there be enough space for kids to play around, if we bring a sofa and a side table in?
Start with being specific, and it will be easier for customers to apply what they are seeing to their own unique cases. It is a shorter route.
* I owe the empty house metaphor to a customer I was chatting with a few days back. It is unbelievable what insights customers can provide.
Unsubscribing from your list should be simple: click a link, unsubscribed.
But if you really decide, for reasons that are probably not really good, to make it difficult for subscribers to unsubscribe, do you have a plan to use the additional information you are requesting? Are you going to extract insights from the answers you get? Is there a way for you to turn those into actions that will, for example, decrease the number of unsubscribes over time?
My guess is, the answer is no.
And so, why bother? Why adding additional steps to a simple process? Why leaving a bad taste in your subscribers’ mouth in the very moment they are signalling they are getting tired of you?
Nobody ever loved something more because they found it difficult to leave it.
As of today, there is nothing more difficult than building an interested, dedicated, and active audience.
As of today, there is nothing more important than building an interested, dedicated, and active audience.
If you are doing anything else, it might feel easier, more impactful, direct, but it is mostly a short term illusion. Get rid of that and start building.
As I have cleaned up the mess that was (still is) my personal inbox, I have grouped together few resources that are worth checking out if you are interested in any of the topics below.
Leadership
Seth Godin’s blog – Delivers daily, and rarely fails. It might be considered “marketing” by most, but I personally consume Seth’s content mainly to keep my practice and work on track.
David Cancel’s The One Thing – Delivers weekly, fairly short messages, loads of wisdom from a guy who has built three multi-million dollars companies and witnessed a good deal of B2B and Saas development in the past decade. Without losing sight on what is important.
Dave Stachowiak’s Coaching for Leaders – This is a weekly podcast, but by subscribing (for free) you are getting weekly episode notes full of great content. Always one of my first recommendations when it comes to a more modern approach to leadership.
Marketing Strategy
Forget the Funnel – Gia and Claire’s customer-led program is all you need to come up with a complete and growth-oriented marketing plan. For free, you still get weekly workshops and a resource library that is basically endless.
Sharebird – For different reasons, I consider Product Marketing has being the strategic foundation of modern marketing, and Sharebird puts together AMAs from Product Marketers of companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, Zuora, Hubspot, and more.
Content Marketing
Animalz – Their weekly newsletters are pretty much a lesson in how to do content marketing themselves. I crave for their “What we’re reading” section, and I recommend joining the Slack community to get feedback and insights on best practices, or just have a chat.
Velocity Partners – I wrote about how much I love Velocity’s messaging, and that is in itself a great reason to get their semi-regular newsletter. And if you want a second one, here is what they did when everyone in marketing was panicking about the covid situation back in April. Brilliant.
This is definitely more content than I can consume in a lifetime, and it is pretty much my final newsletter reading list.
What do you read?
You've got this 