Marketing 17 - MickMel

Do you need Powerpoint?

October 13, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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While slide decks can be a useful tool in some presentations, Steve Jobs was famously against them. When having staff present him with their arguments for or against certainly decisions, he famously believed that:

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need Powerpoint

If you need to make an argument about an upcoming direction, then you should make your point and have a discussion about it rather than going through a bunch of slides.

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Ultimately, it’s not unlike the idea of only using paper for proposals after a deal has been reached. Have a discussion, figure out the direction, and then just write down the results.

No slides?

Of course, Steve Jobs famously used slides in his major presentations, but I think those are different for two reasons:

His slides were very simple, more of just emphasis on his words than on presenting content.
In those situations, a discussion with a room full of hundreds of people wasn’t feasible anyhow.

I see Seth Godin do something similar. He’ll use slides for many of his talks, but they’re very simple slides — the majority are simply an image to go along with whatever story he is telling at the time.

In fact, in his “Nine steps to Powerpoint magic” post from years ago, his very first suggestion is to not use Powerpoint at all! He says:

Most of the time, it’s not necessary. It’s underkill. Powerpoint distracts you from what you really need to do… look people in the eye, tell a story, tell the truth. Do it in your own words, without artifice and with clarity. There are times Powerpoint is helpful, but choose them carefully.

We have a variety of slide decks that we use in our business, and we’ll continue to use many of them, because there are cases when walking through some slides can be a great way to explain an idea with visuals. In most of our meetings, though, we try to simply have a discussion with the other party to help us all understand what the other is looking for and to plot the best path forward. In those cases, slides just get in the way.

An FAQ page might be a sign of bad content

October 8, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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FAQ (“Frequently Asked Questions”) pages are an oft-used feature on websites, with Google showing nearly two billion of them in the search results. There are times when those pages can be helpful for users, but often they become pages full of “we weren’t sure where else to put this”.

If you have a solid content strategy on your website, most common questions should answer themselves in the appropriate place on the site. For example, if you were interested in having GreenMellen help with your logo design, you might wonder how that process works. Do we interview you about the brand? Do we develop initial concepts in black & white? Those kinds of questions are handled in the flow of the content on our logo development page, so there is no need for a separate FAQ section.

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This isn’t to say you should never have an FAQ page on your site, as they suit some industries and sites (such as eCommerce) better than others. Just be careful to avoid simply creating an FAQ page to use it as a dumpster for content that you can’t find a home for, and instead take a bit more time to think through the full content flow of your entire site.

Make sure there is content in your content marketing

October 7, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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Content marketing can be a great thing. If you consistently produce excellent content, it’s a great way to gain more exposure with search engines and build more trust and credibility with potential clients.

Too often, though, I see companies forget the “content” part of content marketing. In these cases, it’s generally when a company produces regular content, but it’s all about their company and their products. It’s certainly wise to publish some content about who you are and what you do, but that’s different than generating effective content marketing.

The Oxford Dictionary defines content marketing this way:

Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

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I would differ a bit from the Oxford definition and say that your content needs to do more than stimulate interest (though that’s a good first step), and actually provide some value. There are lots of ways to create content that stimulates interest, but if there isn’t any value at the end of it, the user will move on to the next site.

Generate high-quality content that provides great value to your users, and they’ll remember you when the time comes.

Effort does not equal value

October 5, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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Years ago, we had a few yards of dirt delivered to our house that needed to be moved uphill about 50 yards to the back of our property. I started moving it with a wheelbarrow, but we eventually broke down and hired someone with a Bobcat to move it for us.

If I had continued to move it by hand, it would have taken all day (say 8 hours).
The guy on the Bobcat had it done in 20 minutes.

Now, which of those efforts produced more value for us? They were exactly the same — the dirt ended up where it needed to go.

If I had continued on moving it manually, it would have taken way more effort but that has absolutely nothing to do with the value of the finished product.

Effort != Value

The same goes for your work. The amount of effort you put into it doesn’t necessarily reflect the value that you’ve created and rarely should your work be priced that way. Seth Godin recently put it this way in an episode of his podcast:

Adam Smith and David Ricardo argued that all value comes from labor, and the value of something is in the amount of labor it took to produce it. But Henry George understood that this is backward. The value of something lies in how much labor we’re willing to exchange for it.

Too often, we’re tempted to price things based on what they cost us to make. It’s more useful to price things based on what they’re worth to those that might want to buy them.

If an industry scales up enough (such as trash service or car repair), pricing will ultimately land at an effort+profit model simply due to competition. For your work, though, don’t feel it needs to be priced high simply because it took you a long time to create, but don’t undervalue something amazing if your skill allows you to build more quickly than others.

The “about” page is the only good place for your company story

October 4, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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When a user visits your website, they usually have a problem that you’re hoping they can solve. If you can show your expertise in understanding the problem (perhaps you’ve faced it as well), show how you can solve it, and give clear next steps, you’re great shape.

We’re talking to a couple of different companies right now that both have a section on their current home page literally titled “about us”. It gets into their experienced team, how long they’ve been around, and various things that don’t matter to someone visiting the site — at least not yet.

When someone visits your website, they want to know how you can help them solve their problem. The problem might be a broken windshield, a sputtering air conditioner, or a pile of products that they just can’t sell. Whatever the problem might be, the first thing they want to know is how you can help them solve it.

Once they think you might be a viable solution to help them, then they’re going to see what you’re all about. In the case of most sites, including the GreenMellen site, the stats support that idea.

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People arrive on our site via tons of different methods, and our “about” page is generally the 14th most popular page where people start. However, regardless where they start on the site, the “about” page is the 2nd most popular page that people visit after they arrive.

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They might start on our home page, or land on a blog post, and hopefully they like what they see. If they do, then they want to see what this company is all about. Having solid content about what makes your company great is certainly something to include on your site, but always put the visitor’s concerns first and let them read about you later.

Be careful when measuring your targets

September 30, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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A few weeks ago, Seth Godin shared a pretty simple statement from Charles Goodhart: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.“

To be honest, it took me a little while to understand what he meant. We set a lot of goals at our company, and we measure our progress toward them. How could that be a bad thing? It’s not, necessarily, but I think it works better when the work you do impacts the measured item, but isn’t something you can do directly.

Will Koehrsen shared a great summary on his blog that explains it well:

In order to increase revenue, the manager of a customer service call center starts a new policy: rather than being paid an hourly wage, every employee is compensated solely based on the number of calls they make. After the first week, the experiment seems like a resounding success: the call center is processing twice the number of calls per day!

The manager, who never bothers to listen to his employees’ conversations as long as their numbers are good, is quite pleased. However, when the boss stops by, she insists on going out to the floor and when she does so, both she and the manager are shocked by what they hear: the employees pick up the phone, issue a series of one word answers, and slam the phone down without waiting for a good-bye. No wonder the number of completed calls has doubled!

Without intending to, by judging performance only by the volume of calls, the manager has incentivized employees to value speed over courtesy.

That’s a very real problem, and it can happen to all of us.

If your goal is to increase your engagement on social media, then it’s easy to post silly quizzes (that have nothing to do with your business) in pursuit of that goal.

If your goal is to increase traffic to your website, there are a lot of easy ways to drive useless traffic to a site.

Go a step deeper

A good way to avoid this is to set your real goal a step deeper. Most companies don’t need more website traffic, they need better website traffic. The problem is that “better” is harder to measure than “more”, so “more” becomes the goal.

Instead, look deeper at your marketing funnel. More traffic at the top might help, but it’s what comes out the bottom of the funnel that really matters. The goal of many businesses is likely to gain more clients and revenue, and in the context of your marketing funnel, getting more traffic to your website might be a good tactic to help get there.

Knowing your numbers can help with this too. You should have a good idea what percentage of visitors make it to each step of your funnel, which makes it easier to spot bogus numbers. If you notice that your website traffic has doubled but visitors that sign up for your lead generation piece stayed flat, the excess visitors on your website are mostly useless.

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Measuring your data is essential, but make sure your measurements aren’t creating false hope.

Yes, it can hurt to “just ask”

September 24, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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You’ve heard the phrase “it can’t hurt to ask”, and while that’s true in many situations, putting it out as a blanket statement can lead to some bad things.

A great example is spam, whether that’s via email, phone calls, or things like LinkedIn connections. In every case, they figure “it can’t hurt to ask”, but collectively, it certainly can. Thousands of companies, each spamming millions of people, creates a mess of stuff that we all need to work through each day. I’ve mentioned before that spam makes it harder for the good stuff to shine, and we recently had a vivid example of this at GreenMellen.

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The voicemail

Our voicemail gets a lot of spam. We filter through it quickly and respond to legitimate calls, but there is a lot to work through. Our clients get our personal phone numbers, but the published number for the company is voicemail only due to the amount of garbage that comes through.

Last week, we got a voicemail that essentially said “This is Steve. Please call me back at 111-222-3333“. I’ve seen that before; with no context around it, Steve is absolutely wanting to try to sell us something, so I ignored it. I was wrong. He left another message a few days later with a bit more info, I called him back, and we had a wonderful conversation. I apologized for not calling more quickly, as that was certainly my error. I could put some blame on him, as I guess you could say that he should have given just a bit more detail in his initial voicemail, but this was certainly on me.

Don’t try to hustle people

Last year I wrote about avoiding trying to hustle those you wish to serve, based on some thoughts from Seth Godin, and he recently following up with a post about the intersection of spam and hustle.

It’s worth reading his entire post, but these two paragraphs sum it up nicely:

“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” the hustling spammer says, using second-order connections to “reach out” to hundreds of people. “No pressure,” they add, as if this diminishes the coarsening of the conversation.
If you ask 100 people for a favor to “get the word out,” then of course you don’t care so much if 80 or 90 people decline. The problem is that you’ve just hurt the relationship you had with these people (as thin as it was) as well as made it more difficult for the next person, the one who actually put some effort and care into making a connection.

Don’t hold back

The one caveat to this is to not become timid. If there is a connection you really want to make or a goal you want to hit, fighting for it can be a great thing. Just be careful of how many of these “just asks” you put out there, and focus on making real connections that don’t require a special ask from either side.

Protect your community

September 16, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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There is a good chance you found this post through an online community that you’re a part of, possibly Facebook or Twitter. While having a community on sites like that is a great thing, it’s also incredibly fragile.

Social media accounts get shut down constantly; mostly for good reasons (spammers, etc), but normal accounts can get caught in the crossfire and it can be very difficult to get them back. Your account (or mine!) could be taken down tomorrow, for no good reason and with no recourse.

In many cases, it’s more of an annoyance than anything. Most social media accounts are for social fun, and having to recreate them would be a pain, but not a serious issue. My wife lost her Twitter account for a few months, and while she eventually got it back it was far more of an annoyance than a major problem.

However, if you’ve built up a healthy community online you’ll want to make sure to have solid control of it in case something goes sideways. Chris Garrett sums it up nicely, with three thoughts:

Build a list. Have an email list outside of your community that you can call upon when needed.
Build a web asset that you own. I’ve talked about this a lot, but it’s huge. Having something that you own is essential for any real community to be secure.
Attract and retain. Don’t stop. Continue to use social media and other tools to grow, but always work to take people across that public to private bridge.

Check out the full post from Chris for more great info.

What’s really the problem?

September 2, 2021 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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When someone tells you they have a problem, there is often a deeper problem below it. Following the concepts in StoryBrand (which I’ve written about with the grunt test and first date proposals before), there are really three layers of problems.

External: This is the problem people really see and share.
Internal: The way that the problem is making them feel.
Philosophical: Why that is wrong.

Using a movie like Star Wars, it’s easy to see how those three stack up.

External: Luke Skywalker needed to destroy the Death Star.
Internal: He wasn’t sure he had it in him to do it.
Philosophical: It all comes down to good versus evil.

Beyond movies

You can find that kind of depth in many movies, but it’s true in business as well. Taking our agency as an example, a big part of what we do is create websites and help drive traffic to them. That’s certainly important, but it’s not really solving a problem by itself. We kind of see things this way:

External: Our clients need more traffic on their website.
Internal: They’re not confident they can do it themselves.
Philosophical: Marketing shouldn’t be seen as a magical black box, but an open approach to solving problems.

Some people may want the “magical black box” of marketing to just work for them, but most approach this with some degree of curiosity. Understanding how things work will help them gain confidence as we work together, which will ultimately lead to more website traffic, more sales, and more success.

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If you want to unpack this idea further, this post from Donald Miller digs deeper and uses an excellent example from The King’s Speech to help explain the overall concept.