Customers make a list of brands before they research, and most of them buy from that list

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It’s well-established that most customers make a list of vendors and do some degree of research before they make a purchase, so the traditional best practices make sense: have quality content, answer questions, and be a guide as customers are doing their research.

However, prior to that research, 80-90% of customers have a short list of vendors in mind already, and 90% of those people end up purchasing from one of those vendors! In short, if you’re not in your buyer’s mind before they start their research, you have no chance with more than 75% of your potential customers. You can find some detail on that in this great article from the Harvard Business Review.

So how do you get into their mind before the research? Spend time in the same places as them online.

Rand Fishkin recently put out a great (short!) video that walks through this, and you can check it out here.

Ultimately, you need to be present on podcasts that they listen to, on social media sites they frequent, in videos that they may want to watch, in blog posts that provide information, and in email newsletters that they consume.

The best part about this kind of work is that it’s a win-win-win:

  • You show up where they already are.
  • You’ve providing content and value to help them for the decision ahead.
  • Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) will eat up that content of yours and make it more likely that you’ll show up there too!

So much of marketing these days involves simply staying top of mind. When a customer is making a list of vendors like yours to consider, make sure you’re already one that they’ve thought of before or else you’ll never even have a chance.

Don’t market more, matter more

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As a marketing guy, I certainly appreciate the value in great marketing. However, too many people work on their “marketing” when they should be focused on their “mattering”.

In a recent podcast from Jay Acunzo, guest Laura Gassner Otting shared this awesome little quote:

“Don’t market more matter more, because when you matter more, you need to hustle for their attention less.”

It reminds me of something that Seth Godin said years ago:

“The people you most want to engage with don’t want to be hustled“

Hustle is a good thing in baseball, but it’s not good in marketing. You should certainly invest time and money into your marketing, but make sure that your company ultimately matters to those you wish to serve.

Check out Jay’s full podcast for more.

Are you eagerly sending business to your competitors?

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The title of this post might seem a little odd, but if your company has solid positioning then you should be turning away many of your leads. If your ideal customer is “anyone”, then who are you really trying to serve?

If you’re well-positioned then you shouldn’t be getting too many ill-fitting leads in the first place, but when you do you should be quick to recognize them and pass them along to another company that is better equipped to handle that kind of opportunity. I’m good friends with most of our business “rivals”, and we pass potential clients to one another frequently in an effort to find the best solution for them.

This came up in a fantastic podcast episode where Stephen Houraghan interviewed Seth Godin about the state of marketing today, during which he unpacked this very idea. You can watch the full interview right here:

This reminds me of a story from years ago when I met an insurance agent that sold literally every kind of insurance, so I had no idea what he really was an expert in. If I had a specific need, he was never going to be the ideal answer. His audience was literally everyone so he was the perfect fit for no one.

None of us are going to be truly eager to turn down business, but if you have a clear position it should make it very easy to send business to your competitors. As a result, when the right opportunity comes along they’ll know that you’re the perfect fit for them.

What is considered spam?

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The definition of spam and cold calls is pretty simple — it’s outreach that the recipient didn’t ask for. If you do cold outreach, you’re showing that you’re not an expert and you’re not really “marketing” to folks.

I recently read (part of) a book called “No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.” by Latané Conant, largely because the title grabbed my attention. I talk about this stuff a lot, so I was curious to see their angle. It wasn’t good.

Early on, Conant shares the experience of being super busy with life (arms full, dropping the kids off at school, worried about a meeting later that morning) and being disrupted by a cold call. It’s the worst, no doubt. The book is very clear that cold calling is awful, which I completely agree with.

However, later in the very first chapter, she shifts gears with this:

“If you follow that rule— if you only send emails to people you know a lot about and who are in- market— it’s nearly impossible to spam. When you deliver content you know people are interested in, right at the time when it’s useful to them, that’s not spam. It’s just a good customer experience.“

By their definition, it’s not “cold” or “spam” if you research your targets ahead of time. Does that really track? I don’t think so.

So what is spam?

Seth Godin says spam is “the email you didn’t ask to get” and that it’s “not moral to steal people’s attention“.

David C. Baker asks if any other experts ever reach out cold, saying “divorce attorney, or maybe it’s a medical practitioner, an expert, or maybe it’s somebody that’s trying to get you out of a tax issue or something, did any of these people call you ahead of time and ask for your business?“.

Baker also shares that “outreach is unprofessional and unbecoming of the expert firm“.

The bigger problem is what Conant says above, with “when you deliver content you know people are interested in…” because every spammer thinks that way. They (hopefully) believe that their solution will help people, and therefore it’s their duty to send it to as many people as possible. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but either way it just doesn’t scale. If every company that thought they had the solution to your problem cold called you, your phone would literally never stop ringing.

I hope that the product or service that you’re offering is truly valuable and that you make a ton of sales, but I also hope you do marketing the right way so you can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Duplicate content is a good thing

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Around a decade ago, I shared some thoughts on how Google handles duplicate content. In short, while duplicate content generally wasn’t really a good thing, there wasn’t a penalty associated with it or anything. We encouraged people to avoid publishing duplicate content, but it wasn’t a huge deal.

These days things have flipped, and duplicate content can be very helpful.

This video from Rand Fishkin explains what I mean. He shares how he frequently uses the same chunk of text along with the name of his company, and as a result the AI tools are always surfacing his company for that very specific phrase.

In particular, he points out his profile on his website, and how when he speaks at events he always encourages those events to use this profile word-for-word. Included in it is a little blurb about his company, including the words “SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software“. Sure enough, if you go to your AI tool of choice and search for things related to finding “audience research software”, SparkToro usually comes up.

Here’s what I see in ChatGPT:

As Rand points out, though, if you search for phrases around “audience research tools” (which is essentially the same phrase), he doesn’t come up at all. AI tools don’t care as much about synonyms as Google does, and they’re just pattern matching words. This means two things:

  • The specific words that you use to describe your company are very important.
  • Once you’ve decided on the words, getting that text published far and wide will be of great benefit to you.

The second bullet is much easier said than done. Publish blog posts, repost on other platforms like Substack and Medium, share frequently on social media, appear on podcasts, use a PR firm to help get published in other places, etc. The more you get it out there, the more the AI tools will pick up on it.

Then, when people are using those AI tools to do research about companies like yours, you just might be the result that is shown.

Check out Rand’s full (3 minute) video for more.

Unsolicited Response Rate

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Jay Acunzo recently shared a great new marketing metric that I want find a way to measure. How often do people reach out to you, unsolicited, because of something that you wrote or said?

Worded a bit better, from Jay:

Without gaming it, without asking for it, once you “get in front of” others, do your ideas COMPEL a response? Not hate or snark, and again, not the gamed approaches I see used here to trigger a reply (“Comment WANT to get my…”). No, the question is, are your ideas valuable enough, original enough, HIGH-IMPACT enough to compel an unsolicited response?

It’s brilliant, and very hard to achieve.

We all see the posts that he’s referring to where people play games to create engagement. That’s not always bad, but it’s not real engagement. What does it look like when people really resonate with and respond to what you put out into the world?

In our case, I often see a lot of this after we host a Meetup. While we usually have time for Q&A during the Meetup, it’s the responses that come in later that are so rewarding. Having people reach out after just to tell us that they found it to be informative and worthwhile is a great sign that we’re doing the right thing.

As more and more people play silly games to try to boost fake engagement, how can you show up in the world today in an authentic way that inspires people to respond?

Jay’s post goes deeper into the details of how he sees this happening, and I encourage you to check out his full post for more.

Draw attention to the flaws

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Trust is one of the most valuable assets you can have in a business relationship, and a great way to build trust is by pointing out some of your own flaws. This can happen a few different ways.

First, as I shared a few years ago, is the idea of sharing weaknesses that the audience is already aware of. In that situation, you’ll earn a few trust points without having to give away any new information. From Robert Cialdini’s book “Pre-Suasion“:

“The tactic can be particularly successful when the audience is already aware of the weakness; thus, when a communicator mentions it, little additional damage is done, as no new information is added—except, crucially, that the communicator is an honest individual.”

The other way is to point out flaws that people were otherwise unaware of. In David Ogilvy’s classic book “Confessions of an Advertising Man“, Ogilvy shares this example:

“I always tell prospective clients about the chinks in our armor. I have noticed that when an antique dealer draws my attention to flaws in a piece of furniture, he wins my confidence.”

This is something that I consistently work to do. For example, when people ask about how we measure marketing metrics I share all of the powerful tools that we use and how they work, but I also share how proper attribution is becoming harder to measure. I’m not happy about that, but it’s the state of the world we’re in, and I’m not ashamed to admit that weakness in the system.

Carefully sharing flaws can be a very powerful way to build trust.

Asking “how did you find us?” almost never works

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It’s common in business to ask your customers “how did you find us?”, as it can be very helpful as you work to understand where to put your future marketing spend and effort. The problem is that the answers you get are almost never accurate.

It’s not that people are lying, but they simply can’t accurately tell you what happened. Rand Fishkin at SparkToro recently shared a great video where he laid out the two main problems.

  • If you give people a list of options to choose from, the items at the top of the list (no matter what order they’re in) get picked the most.
  • They did a test where a company put in a fake answer that sounded realistic (“Did you come from this popular Youtuber?”) and a lot of the respondents chose that as the answer, even though it literally couldn’t have been the case.

He goes on to share the bigger problem; you can ask your customers how they found you, but what about the people that don’t know about you? How can you position yourself so that they can find you as well?

There is a similar problem when you dig into keyword research for search engine optimization. You can run reports showing the keywords that people typed in to find your site, and that’s great! The problem is that you really want to know what keywords people are typing in and not finding your site, and that won’t show up on any report.

I encourage you to keep asking your customers “how did you find us?”, as it’ll certainly give you some degree of insight, but just beware that the information you get is unlikely to be very accurate. Check out Rand’s video for more.

Where do your customers form their opinions?

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Google is increasingly becoming a place where people go to find a specific website or company, but not where their journey really begins — it’s more often where their journey ends. However, the data can make this seem a little confusing.

As shared by Rand Fishkin, this chart shows which sites drive the most traffic on the web:

Looking at that, it seems that you should really be investing in getting more traffic from Google. However, that chart is a bit misleading because it simply shows where people come from, but not what motivated the words in their search.

Rand goes on to share this chart, which shows where people spend their time online:

You can see that search is just a tiny piece of that (10.25%). Your customers are on those other sites, where they learn about you and your industry, read reviews, talk with others, and form their opinion on next steps. Once that opinion is formed, they often head to Google to navigate to your website (or the site of your competitor).

Google shouldn’t be ignored, but the data you see for traffic coming to your site likely isn’t really showing what leads people to find you in the first place.

How your brand can grow

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Most companies are looking for ways to grow their brand, and options for doing so are nearly limitless. However, some strategies will work much better and have longer-lasting results than others.

In his book “This is Marketing“, Seth Godin lays out his overall philosophy on this:

The truth is that most brands that matter, and most organizations that thrive, are primed by advertising but built by good marketing. They grow because users evangelize to their friends. They grow because they are living entities, offering ever more value to the communities they serve. They grow because they find tribes that coalesce around the cultural change they’re able to produce.

You can pour increasingly large amounts of money into advertising, and that can certainly help, but the biggest brands grow because users want to share them with others. Word of mouth still dominates marketing, and most podcasts grow because of individual sharing and not because of their iTunes ranking.

You need to get the core pieces in place first, like a solid website and great marketing, but if users aren’t compelled to tell their friends about you and the value you offer, real growth will be hard to find.