Should people respond to your marketing, or should they react to it?

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When you put content out into the world, you hope that it connects with other people. If so, it often is in one of two ways: they can respond to it, or they can react to it. Those are very different things.

The world of medicine is a perfect example of this:

  • “She is responding well to treatment”. Excellent.
  • “That was an unexpected reaction to the medication”. That’s not good.

There are some companies that push for reactions to their marketing, but they’re generally not well-liked. These are companies that will promote outrageous commercials (scantily dressed women, ridiculous promises, etc).

On the other hand, many companies will generate content that they hope people will respond to, which is almost always a better way to approach things.

This applies to events in your life, too. On “The Growth Equation” website, the author shared this about what happens when people face a change in their lives:

Responding, a spin off from the word responsibility, is considerate and deliberate. Reacting, on the other hand, literally means to meet one action with another one. It is immediate and rash.

You can’t tell users which road they should take when it comes to your marketing, but the way you choose to put it out into the world will point people very strongly in one direction or another.

Marketing is all of it

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It’s kind of funny that we refer to our company as (in part) a “marketing firm”, because we don’t really do marketing. We can’t. We help with promotion and advertising, which is a big piece of it, but marketing is really everything that your company does.

It’s how you answer the phone.

It’s how you show up to serve customers.

It’s how you treat your vendors.

It’s how you help your community.

It’s really not that different from branding. When people hear about your company, what do they immediately think of?

Promotion and advertising are very important for almost every company, but your marketing begins long before you hire us.

I don’t know you, but I know all of you

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If I walk up to a random person, I don’t know much about what they think or how they act. I likely wouldn’t be able to immediately determine who they voted for in the last election, what their favorite color is, or which baseball team they root hardest for.

However, if I was in a room with 100 random people, I could do a lot better on my guessing. Around 50 people would have voted for Joe Biden, around 25 would say that blue is their favorite color, and the vast majority (around here) would say that they root for the Atlanta Braves.

It’s the same with your marketing. Watching the behavior of a single person on your website could be very interesting, but it likely won’t help with decisions. On the other hand, if you look at the data from your last 10,000 visitors, you’re likely to get a very clear picture.

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Arthur Conan Doyle famously said:

“You can, for example, never foretell what any man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”

This is why we work hard to monitor various marketing tools to get a good idea of how people are using a particular website or social media platform. Tools like scorecards and heatmaps can tell us a lot about how the typical user is interacting with a site, and we can make informed decisions based on that.

If someone has a specific problem interacting with something that we’ve built, we certainly want to unpack that, but our main goal is to make sure everyone is able to make the best use of whatever we put out into the world.

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The public to public bridge?

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About a year ago, I shared some great thoughts from David Perell about the concept of the public to private bridge. In short, the idea there is to use public channels like social media to drive people back to private assets you fully control (like your blog and email list). Given the volatility of social media, this is something that essentially every content creator should be doing.

However, rather than the “public to private” bridge, I often see a “public to public” bridge, which is where people encourage their users to follow them on a different public platform. For example, here was a tweet that I recently came across:

I’ve seen similar posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, and I’m sure you have too. It’s not a horrible thing to do, but ties more into vanity than actual engagement. It may be anecdotal, but people that frequently post these kinds of messages also tend not be very active in their own comments.

To quote a podcast title from GaryVee, “Reply to EVERY Comment You Get Until The End of Time“. You may grow to a point where it’s impossible to keep up (like he is now), but for the rest of us it’s not a big deal to continue the conversation with those that are engaging with you.

Public –> Public

Back to the “public to public bridge”, I see two problems with that approach:

  1. You’re talking to people that are already following you on a platform that they clearly use (because they saw your message). You win! They’re following and reading your stuff, so why push them elsewhere? Engage where you are.
  2. You’re likely not driving anyone to your private platform, or in many cases, you might not even have a private platform at all.

If you want to use your public platform to drive people to another public platform of yours, that’s certainly your right. From my perspective, though, you’re either reading this on my self-hosted blog, through my email list, or you’re reading it on a platform where you already follow me. If you want to join my email list, please do, but the fact that you’re reading this is already a win and I’ll take it.

It’s not moral to steal people’s attention

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In a recent episode of his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin dropped a rather profound statement in the middle of talking, but I wanted to pause for a minute and unpack it. He simply said:

‘It’s not moral to steal people’s attention”

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of it, but I think it can go a few ways.

When you say “steal” attention, it makes me think of spam. Marketers can call them “cold emails” or “cold calls”, but those are just nice words to say they’re spamming. I’m not always the most polite to people that contact me that way.

However, you also have situations where companies are fighting for your attention in a way that is a bit more acceptable, like TV or radio ads. If I’m watching traditional TV (or non-ad-free Hulu), I expect commercials. I don’t like them, but I know it’s part of the deal — they’re providing content to me, and I’m paying for it with the commercials. It’s unattractive, but completely acceptable.

Stealing

The difference with cold emails spam is that you’re getting nothing in return. They’re stealing your attention to try to sell their products, with nothing in return. It’s “just one email”, but if everyone behaved that way we’d descend into chaos.

Proper marketing is about earning attention. Create content that is beneficial and worth sharing. Do work that people talk about. Don’t steal the attention of others — earn it.

Promotion = interruption

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I’ve made no secret of how much I hate interruption-based marketing.

TV and radio ads are ok, because I accept them as part of the deal. The same with podcast ads; I can choose to pay for the premium ad-free version, or I can choose to listen to the ones with ads. It’s my decision, and I’ll live with the consequences.

Beyond that you find things like cold calls, cold emails, and cold messages on sites like LinkedIn, and I have no patience for any of those. If your marketing relies on interrupting my day to pitch your offer, you’ve already lost. And no, I generally won’t be too polite.

In a recent post, Seth Godin put it well when comparing Marketing vs Promotion, as they’re not the same thing.

Marketing is creating the conditions for a story to spread so you can help people get to where they hope to go. Marketing is work that matters for people who care, a chance to create products and services that lead to change.

As Seth said, marketing is work. It’s not easy, but it’s tremendously valuable.

He ends with:

If you have to interrupt, trick or coerce people to get the word out, you might be doing too much promotion and not enough marketing.

David Meerman Scott says that you can either Bug, Beg, Bug, or Earn your way to attention. Go earn it.

If we spam you, please be polite to us

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I recently came across a fascinating thread on LinkedIn where salespeople were frustrated by being “ghosted” by potential clients. They’d reach out, and simply get no response.

Ghosting someone isn’t generally a nice thing to do, but there was a big difference with this thread — almost everyone in there was sending cold emails (you know, spam) and they were upset with the lack of polite “no’s” that people were offering if they’re not interested.

If you’re having an ongoing conversation with a potential client, and they choose to work with someone else, getting a “no” response from them should be expected. That’s not the case here.

Knowing that most of us get 10-20 of these spammy emails every day, taking the time to respond to all of them would be silly. Those in this thread do not agree, though. Their thought is that if you say “no” they’ll stop bugging you, and so it’s in your best interest to do so. That may be true, but it feels more like a threat — “I will continue to spam you until you write back”.

From Christopher:

Could not agree more. Respond with a direct reason why it’s not a good fit or you’re not the right person allows me to update my CRM and leave you be.

Or Andrew, who says that a “no” isn’t enough, and you should pester them for more info:

I’ve turned a lot of no’s into cash flow for both sides. Gotta be careful I agree-but sometimes diamonds lie just on the other side of where you stopped digging. Ask the hard question of “why” before stopping at no.

Or from Bali:

Just be polite and respectful and answer the email or reply to the voicemail. The ones with integrity will not be offended at all. We are doing our job.

You can check out the full thread on LinkedIn and read more for yourself to gain more context.

Seth Godin has a few great thoughts on this. From a very old blog post of his:

Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can’t possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?)

(On a side note, this is exactly why a blog is great. If Seth had posted that on social media eight years ago instead of his blog, it’d be unfindable today. Own your stuff.)

More recently, I heard him simply say: “Selfish can’t be fixed, apparently.“

I agree with him that it should be considered selfish to send someone an unsolicited message and then complain when the prospect won’t even be “respectful” enough to give a reply. Respect needs to be earned, not threatened. Earn it.

Your visitors have their own mission

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Your company very likely has a mission statement that you’re proud of, and you probably should be. Having a solid mission is a great thing, but your customers care almost nothing about it. When they come to your site, they don’t want to hear about your mission — they have their own mission that they’re working through.

In a recent post, Tom Tortorici put it this way:

What they appear to be forgetting is that their website reader is on their own mission.

If someone is interested enough in your business, they’ll ultimately head over to your “about us” page to learn more about what’s behind the company. First, though, they need to know that you can help them with their mission.

Looking at the stats for the GreenMellen site, the majority of people already that fill out our contact form came from our about page. They look around the site to see if we can help, then learn more about us, then reach out.

If that process is out of order, it’s far less likely to be successful. Help the visitor understand that you are a good fit to help them accomplish their mission and then they’ll take the time to get to know you.

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Problem Solving versus Problem Finding

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Years ago, salespeople had all of the knowledge. If you needed information about a specific feature on a car, or a list of homes for sale in your area, there was no Google to help you out — you needed a human. The best salespeople were great problem solvers.

These days, much of that has gone away. You can go to a car dealership as well-informed (if not more) than the sales staff, so their information is no longer their weapon.

In most cases, customers that know what their problem is don’t need help solving it. Instead, they need more help finding the right problem to solve.

In a recent episode of Guy Kawasaki’s “Remarkable People” podcast, Guy interviewed author Daniel Pink who framed it like this:

And finally, and I think this is one of the most intriguing things, is that we used to be in a world of problem solving. So that you had salespeople who would say, “Ah, I’m not really in sales, I’m a problem solver.” And that’s cool.

It’s just that today, if your customer prospect knows exactly what their problem is, they don’t need you. So when do they need you more? They need you when they’re wrong about their problem, or they don’t know what their problem is. And so the skill shifted from the skill of problem solving to the skill of problem finding. Can you identify hidden problems, surface latent problems?

The key to unpacking those hidden problems often comes from asking the right questions. I’ve found some great resources lately to help uncover great questions (like this podcast episode and this PDF).

The right questions can help uncover the right problem, which is likely the best direction to go in many of your interactions today.

Unexpected ads are the problem

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Advertising isn’t a problem. Most people recognize that services are often paid for via advertising, and that’s often preferred over having to pay out of our own pockets.

However, unexpected advertising is a bigger problem.

If I’m watching TV, listening to the radio (or a podcast), or browsing a website, I know ads are likely to be present. They may be annoying, but they’re expected.

However, things like cold emails, cold phone calls and other intrusive ads are unexpected and we see them under much harsher light. In the David Meerman Scott theory of ads, these go from the “buy” category of normal ads to the “bug” category of ads that we all hate.

Earning attention is always your best bet, and buying ads is sometimes a direction that you need to go. However, if you find that surprising people with unexpected ads is your only choice, you may need to revisit your strategy.