vicodin
January 16, 2012
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Have you had an overload of content yet? Don’t worry … you will.
For all the great things our Internet enabled interconnections have given us, we pay by receiving gobs of completely useless content, most of which is apparently generated by green marketers and my Facebook friends. The number of bytes per second received by today’s average wired human now exceeds the number of bytes per second sent by all the world’s mainframes in the 1960s. Marketing content – especially HTML layered ads – is devolving into poorly targeted noise that is more aggravating than accepted.
People are tuning out in the same way they learned how not to watch TV commercials by 1958.
 Advertising noise has always been problematic for marketers, and the Internet in some ways is making it worse. Since marketers are responsible for much of this noise, they are creating their own problem. For any message to be heard, it has to get past the noise in exactly the same way as a whisper has to be close and personal to be heard in a noisy bar. As the Internet noise level rises, savvy marketers will narrow and target their outreach. To do so, they will need to focuses on three things that make messages viable:
Precision: Messages have to be precise, which means they must succinctly communicate value. Vague targeting, abstract language, and even too many words keep people from hearing what you have to say (which is why most people can’t stay awake during a politician’s stump speech).
Value: Value propositions have to be compelling to well-targeted audiences. Failure to communicate value provides motivation to quit paying attention. One clear statement about why your product is valuable will cut through 1,000 glitzy and wordy pitches from your competitors.
Incremental: Using your landing page to tell every buyer genotype everything about your product creates both confusion and frustration. Like dating, the processes is one of incremental familiarity. Giving the right message, to the right person at the right time in their buying decision process eliminates noise fatigue.
Content flooding provides little aside from keyword litter and generally poor leads. Precise, succinct, highly targeted and step-wise messages creates paying customers.
December 20, 2011
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Intersections cause collisions, but also opportunities.
A basic marketing strategy is practice to find the intersection of what customers want to achieve (expected outcomes) and where the market is not providing that solution. Alternately, one can look for places where different technologies can, for the first time, be combined and create previously unavailable value.
Smart phones are now ready to facilitate SoLoMo.
 The three raging factors in markets and marketing today are SOcial, LOcation-based apps and MObile. The real-time enabled combination of these three may well be the next major moment in consumer technology and marketing. The ability to reach people in tight geographical clusters, who are sharing an experience or looking for one, will be an exciting market in which to pitch.
Social is about sharing. As witnessed by Facebook posts, it is the moment in which the user has the impetus to share that is important. What one is thinking, feeling and experiencing is what they wish to share. To a limited degree Facebook and Twitter enable such sharing since you can Tweet and post from your handsets. But it lacks location services that enable bridging the people in or near a location (after all, why not share what you and another 25,000 people at the Rolling Stones concert are experiencing).
The other weakness is the asynchronous nature of current social media. Most people open Facebook during lunch or after a day’s work. Some folks browse Twitter weekly (which rather defeats the purpose). Real-time enablement of interaction between near-by individuals, especially when it pulls people in from slightly larger distances (say drawing people into a hot night club from the competing bars on that block) creates new interaction potential (mostly pleasant).
More interesting yet to marketers might be the ability to pool information about people clustered geographically. Merging big data pools of demographic and psychographic information, combined with location identification of individuals could provide real-time promotional opportunities (which will take a real-time arbitrage so the demo/psychographics enable the right advertisers). What if in real-time a common profile of a particular Rolling Stones concert attendee was a 70 year old man (this time is coming) that prefers bourbon? No bother selling ads space to Dr. Pepper.
Like social media a few years ago, this is a largely undefined area for experimentation. On the marketing end, the ability to create highly local participation, or to market to people sharing a location at the same instant, offers the marketer some unique targeting opportunities.
Which means Google (local, Android, Plus, ad trafficking) has all the necessary tools to make this happen now.
November 29, 2011
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Video is a great marketing tool that people use poorly.
The current vogue in online video, aside from cheap distribution of funny commercials on YouTube, is the animated 60-second-or-less landing page. These short videos relay the primary value proposition of a product, and perhaps some insight into how the product works. In the chain of discovery that buyers endure, this is the very first step – understanding why they should care about you. Short landing page videos give buyers a reason to investigate further.
They then are forced to either divulge personal information in ham-handed calls-to-action (and risk getting a sales phone call), or wade through increasingly dense web copy in order to learn important product details.
 Why do companies stop using video after the landing page? This came to mind while reviewing case studies of Silicon Strategies Marketing clients. We once scripted a series of “deep dive” overview videos for DeviceAnywhere. These videos guided prospects through what DeviceAnywhere products did at a level of detail that technical buyers needed. End-to-end, the videos took about 30 minutes and were broken into sections that addressed specific needs their technical customers typically had.
DeviceAnywhere reassigned two of their three technical sales teammates who had been performing online demos all day long, and DeviceAnywhere saw zero declines in conversions.
Videos have a great deal of potential for guiding different buyer genotypes through the phases of discovery, and allowing them to engage your sales teams at the moment their curiosities are completely satisfied. This is important because selling is a little like dating: leaping from a first date to a marriage proposal rarely works. Buyers go through phases of learning and trust building – from discovering they have a need, through investigating solutions, gathering details, sharing information internally, etc. Yet nearly nobody is chaining videos in such a way as to help people rapidly learn during each of these sales cycle phases.
In our 15-second, sound-bite driven world, it may well be essential.
As always, leading buyers by the nose throughout this discovery and learning process is essential. Unsupervised thinking is discouraged. In each phase, you need to:
- Create specific content that picks-up cleanly from the previous phase, and leads logically into the next.
- Provide escapes and multiple calls-to-action so a buyer at any time can take actions that accelerate sales.
- Separate content based on buyer genotypes and tailor each throughout the chain.
Video communicates better than any salesman, and works twenty four hours a day. Put it to work through the entire sales cycle.
October 11, 2011
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 Dr. John, the King of New Orleans, sings a song that advises other musicians to “Keep That Music Simple.”
The same concept applies to market messages.
Rushing to tell every audience everything about your product leads to muddled messages. Your headline and opening blurbs have a 15 second shelf life before a reader’s attention wanders. Instantly connecting their motivations to your value proposition requires keeping the message simple.
Oracle has a long history of being blunt in their marketing. Their magazine ads were once the most direct in the business, targeting techies and laying out Oracle’s performance superiority. Prospects instantly understood the value offered by Oracle and thus acquired a bias for the product. Instant believability based on instant cognition.
For contrast sake, let us look at IBM’s top-line message for their DB2 database. It reads “DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows is optimized to deliver industry-leading performance across multiple workloads, while lowering administration, storage, development, and server costs.” Aside from run-on sentences being unreadable, it says nothing aside from common claims made by all competitors. No differentiation, no proof, nothing which a buyer might instantly believe.
Tech web sites are filled with even worse messaging. One example of an opening subheadline I recently saw was “ZZZ is both our company and our technology. Our employees, processes, and tools help people solve a range of business intelligence problems to unlock the potential of their organizations.” Simplicity was lost thanks to saying nothing that a customer needs to know, convoluting many non-product elements and omitting anything that resembled a value proposition.
My dictionary defines message as “a communication containing some information, news, advice, or the like.” Pretty simple, no? Do your messages contain essential elements stated simply? Keep that music and those messages simple.
August 16, 2011
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“Buy our features,” said the German software company representative. “You vill like our features.”
The way he said it sounded vaguely threatening.
More to the point is that nobody buys features, his or yours. Not in B2C markets and not in B2B ones either. Advertising features, and to a large degree benefits, misses the mark in marketing communications. The reason is that features and benefits do not describe what drives a buyer’s intent.
What motivates buyers, both logically and emotionally does.
Hunger provides motivation. So do natural sexual impulses (which often leads to children, which then launches a thousand new motivations, including the desire to find very dark and quiet places in which to hide). A person’s motivations force them into seeking ways to achieve something (their expected outcome) or make them instantly aware of a possible solution when it is thrust under their noses.
That last one only applies if the value proposition presented addresses their motivations.
 It is the intersection of a buyer’s motivation and your differentiated offering that define your value propositions. You must itemize the motivations of your buyers, identify which features of your product satisfy those motivations, and what subset of those features are unique to your product (after all, if you solve the buyer’s problems in the same way as your competitors, then you are selling a commodity and the buy decision boils down to either brand preference or price).
Where nearly every marketing organization goes horribly wrong is in the first or the last point. Many never map the motivations (and expected outcomes) of their buyers, much less different buyer genotypes and different market segments. They fail to express these motivations in the language of their buyers. They don’t bother to know why someone wants to solve a problem, and lean on merely understanding the problem alone. Alternately or in combination, they toss whatever feature the marketing team thinks is hot, trendy or buzz worthy – even if thirty thousand competitors are promoting the same thing, and in the process are buried in a noisy tomb.
Blood drains from the faces of start-up CEOs that I coach on this aspect of value proposition identification. They often realize that they have no differentiation, that their differentiation makes no difference to buyers or, that they spent their second mortgage creating a product with the same value points that Google, Microsoft or Apple deliver. The same thing happens to marketing directors in large conglomerates who I council. There is nothing worse than not being appealing to the person you want to seduce (just ask the gold chain wearing, balding, potbellied, toothpick chewing disco relic haunting the single’s bar every night who always goes home alone).
The process for listing motivations and identifying differentiated intersections is not always difficult, but it is dangerous because many marketing tacticians take shortcuts. They assume that they understand their buyers well enough to understand their buyers’ motivations. Yet this is more often than not mere introspection, or worse, the skewed last recall of a lost sale. Their a priori process often fails to document emotional motivations of buyers and incorporate those into viable value proposition. Apple’s dancing iPod silhouettes said nothing about the gizmo’s frequency response and how many songs it could store, but it said volumes about how their target market felt (emotion) about music.
Do your motivation mapping homework, and if in doubt outsource it to someone disconnected from your market. When you find these magic intersections you will articulate the value that you provide and can develop your own dancing silhouettes.
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