Deceit is a poor marketing tactic

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A while back I shared how you shouldn’t try to hustle those that you wish to serve. Taking shortcuts to try to reach people is rarely a good idea.

For example, the below came in the mail from a local HVAC company, with the indications of a check (such as “pay to the order of”) clearly visible through the envelope window. During tax season, this is probably a great way to get people to open the mail.

As a result, Casteel has begun our relationship by being intentionally deceptive in order to start a conversation. How could that possibly lead to a good outcome? Hustling those that you wish to serve is just a foolish and selfish thing to do. David Meerman Scott has said that you can Buy, Beg, Bug, or Earn attention — even he didn’t think that “deceive” was something that should go on the list, because it’s so ridiculous.

If you’re in the Atlanta area, use a company like Summit Heating and Air instead. They’ve earned the respect of our area by being heavily involved in the community, treating people right, and never sending out deceptive mail like this one.

I was fantastic with Google+

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I thought Google+ was a great product. I dug in deep, and developed a solid following on there. Today, that’s worth absolutely nothing.

It’s good to develop strong skills in a particular area, but it’s even better to develop skills that don’t rely on a particular piece of technology or a single service.

My Google+ experience makes me feel like the fish that Stephen Jay Gould referred to when he said:

“Even if fishes hone their adaptations to peaks of aquatic perfection, they will all die if the pond dries up.”

It’s a tricky balance. On one hand, you don’t want to go too wide. Most people that try to be super active on a dozen different social media platforms tend to end up with mediocre outcomes in all them. On the other hand, relying on a single platform for your reach isn’t ideal either — that’s Donald Trump’s biggest problem with having been kicked off of Twitter.

In my case, I should have done a better job of building the public to private bridge that David Perell has talked about. My email list is growing nicely now (come join it!), but I should have been working harder on it years ago. The more you can attract people to places that you truly own (like email lists and blogs), the more sustainable your efforts will be in the long run.

Buy, Beg, Bug, or Earn

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Interruption marketing is fading, and most people are very happy about that. While we’ll likely have traditional interruption-based ads for the foreseeable future (TV, radio, etc), true interruptions like cold calls are finally starting to go away.

According to David Meerman Scott, there are really four ways to reach a potential buyer:

  1. You can BUY attention (this is traditional advertising)
  2. You can BEG for attention (this is traditional media relations)
  3. You can BUG people one at a time to get attention (this is traditional sales)
  4. Or you can EARN attention online by creating great information that your buyers want to consume such as YouTube videos, blogs, Twitter feeds, photographs, infographics, charts, graphs, and ebooks—and it is all free.

It’s a fantastic place to be. Rather than calling 100 folks and irritating almost all of them, you can create information online that will attract the very people you wish to serve.

You can continue to buy, beg, and bug if you want, but earning attention is so much more fruitful for everyone involved.

Anchor and twist

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This term has been around for a long time, but I hadn’t noticed it until very recently. It has to do with sharing new ideas, and “anchoring” them to something people are familiar with and then “twisting” into how the new product is different.

It’s similar to Seth Godin’s concept of putting your new product in the right genre so that people can understand where it fits, and then later explaining how yours is different and better.

Compio wrote a post a while back that gave some good examples:

  • TiVo works like a VCR (anchor) with TV shows (twist).
  • Spyder is like Speedo (anchor) for skiers (twist).
  • Sermo is a FaceBook (anchor) for doctors (twist)

This came up in a recent conversation with a company that wanted to rank well in Google for a phrase that no one would be looking for. Ranking #1 for something that no one searches for is useless. Instead, you should work to rank well for other attributes about your product, and then introduce them to your new phrase.

BeamPrint

For example, suppose I developed a product to make wireless printing easier and I called “BeamPrint”. Ranking #1 for that would be pretty easy, but no one would find me.

Instead, I’d want to try to rank well for terms like “wireless printing” or “mobile printing”. The page could then say:

“If you have trouble getting your wireless printer to work properly, come try out BeamPrint and never be frustrated by that again.”

In the world of digital marketing, anchors are the key. Make it easy for people to get a general idea of what you do, and then you can take them down the path of why your new solution is the one they need.

Are your requests scaring customers away?

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When we’re developing a website, we work hard to make sure that every single page has a goal. The call-to-action (CTA) might be to sign up for a newsletter, reach out with more questions, or to simply continue on to another article for more information, but you have to have something there. Too often I find web pages that get to the end of the content and then… nothing.

However, if you go in too aggressively with your CTA, you might just scare people away instead. Much like the idea of not proposing on a first date, easing people toward a commitment is usually the right way to go.

An easy place to start is by asking for less information. If you have an email sign-up form on your site, asking fewer questions will generally result in a much higher conversion rate. While I’d love to know the zip code and annual income of everyone on our list, reducing the questions and only asking for their email address is a much easier commitment for a user to take.

Why is someone here?

As you’re working to figure out the goal for each page, taking the time to understand why someone might be reading a particular page can help you understand how far into the journey they are.

  • If they’re browsing your “about” page, they’re likely pretty new.
  • If they’re looking at the details in your knowledgebase find out how your system handles on obscure scenario, it’s likely that they’re much further along. Treat them accordingly.

For most people, simply taking the time to have a goal in mind for every page would be a huge step forward, but if you can craft the CTA for each page based on the type of person you expect would be there, you’ll see much better results.

B2B isn’t really a thing

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Our marketing agency focuses on serving “B2B service-based companies”, and it’s worked out very well for us. However, “B2B” (business-to-business) isn’t really a thing.

For example, we work with a logistics company, but we’ve never spoken with “the company” — we talk to people like Geri and Wade.

We work with a land planning company, but we’ve never started a call with “so how are you doing today, land planning company?” We talk to Kristian and David.

Companies will never seek you out

Where this matters is when you work to frame up the buyer personas for your company. You might want to work with Starbucks one day, but “Starbucks” isn’t ever going to call. However, with the right angle, you might get their VP of Marketing to chat with you at some point. That’s who you should be trying to appeal to.

Trying to appeal to “Starbucks” will never work, but if you can address the pain points that their individual staff members are facing, you might have a chance to move things forward.

In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Hadley simple says:

“no business truly sells to another business; we all sell to people.”

B2B

We certainly work best with companies that have a B2B focus, but at the end of the day we’re really working to reach the humans at those companies, so that we can help them reach the right humans for their own growth.

Selling versus hustling

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For a while in the early years of our company, I didn’t like the idea of selling. I wasn’t against doing it, but the idea of it just felt kind of sleazy. My experience with salespeople had been for things like cars where it always felt like they were trying to hustle you.

Over time, I learned that sales can be a win-win for both parties. As I talked about last year, customers are looking for a value imbalance in their favor, and you can give it to them. If they can get more value out of your product than it cost them, and you can still earn a profit against your costs, everybody wins.

Hustle

Years ago, Seth Godin talked about the idea of the two kinds of hustle. There’s the hustle of working hard and putting in the hours, and then the hustle I was talking about above; the kind of person that “will cut corners if it helps in getting picked.”

Proper selling is far different than hustling. It’s about meeting people’s needs, and providing exceptional value relative to their cost. As long as I know that the services we sell are worth far more than the client needs to pay, selling becomes easy. I’ve heard others say that when you hit a point where you’re very confident that the value of your product far exceeds its cost, then failing to sell it is actually doing a disservice to those that could benefit from it.

In his book “To Sell Is Human“, author Daniel Pink puts it this way:

Be sure you can answer the two questions at the core of genuine service. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you’re doing something wrong.

Keep selling, but don’t try to hustle.

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You won’t be discovered, and that’s ok

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Years ago, many people desired to be “discovered”, particularly in industries like music. Make some great stuff, and then hope that the right person hears it and can vault you to stardom. Those days are long gone, but it’s ok.

These days, with sharing so painfully easy, any great talent will quickly be shared and become known without the intervention of someone like a record label. As Hugh MacLeod said in his book “Ignore Everybody“:

You don’t have to waste time, sitting around waiting to be discovered. Be proactive, network and use the internet to get your message out to the world.

It’s yours to take! Keep putting out amazing content, and your audience will slowly (or perhaps rapidly) grow.

The same is true for business. I mentioned last month that if your business requires that you buy advertising to survive, you’re likely in trouble. Hugh puts it this way:

“If your business plan depends on suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.”

Ads can potentially help you get there, but you should be able to grow to some degree without them. If you’re not yet where you want to be with your business idea or your artistic talent, just keep being proactive and keep making pots.

More content doesn’t mean more traffic, except when it does

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If you’re striving to get your site to rank higher in Google, you often hear two big things: Google loves more content and Google loves fresh content. Neither are necessarily true, though they’re not necessarily false either.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s consider “more content” and “fresh content” to be the same thing. If you’re going to work toward either, you’re going to accomplish both. The question is, does Google care?

At a high level, the answer is a clear “no”. In a recent tweet, seen below, Google’s John Mueller was super clear about it:

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable did a good job of explaining how John is accurate, but how more content still can be beneficial. Barry said:

I can relate, creating more content, does not always translate to more traffic. Sometimes sites push out bad or spammy content and that won’t always lead to more traffic. But in general, if you write quality and useful content often, it is more likely that you can produce more traffic from more content. Not always but often.

If you strive to write great new content frequently, it’s going to help you rank better in search. Not because it’s “more” or “fresh”, but because you’re generating more individual pieces of content that may be worthy of showing in the search results for other users. If search engine rankings are important, quality beats quantity every time.

Google won’t directly reward you for the fact that you’re putting out lots of content, but if the content is high-quality then you’ll see the rewards anyhow.

Eliminate to get great

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I’ve mentioned a few times on here that the more you polish a piece of writing or a speech, the shorter it will generally become. As you refine your points, you can find easier ways to get things across and allow people to understand your point with few words. These great quotes from Blaise Pascal and Woodrow Wilson help to emphasize that point.

However, it’s not just words that can use refinement. Generally speaking, great design has fewer elements than poor design does. This is seen a bit in the cycle of simple, or in the humorous example of how Microsoft perhaps would have designed the original iPod packaging.

Minh D. Tran said it perfectly, using very few words to get their idea across:

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“Great design is eliminating all unnecessary details.”

I’ve said before that every web page should have a goal, and that applies to print design, billboards, menus, or anything else you might put together. Determine the goal, and then work to eliminate as many distractions as possible.