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Articles filed in: Storytelling
5 Steps To Making Things People Want
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Here’s the subject line ‘just curious’ email I got the other day. Maybe you got one too? The marketing consultant had gone to the trouble to know my name, but that’s where the personalisation ended.
“Hi Bernadette,
By any chance, are you interested in solutions for getting sales appointments and leads?
XYZ does so on multiple channels. Our package integrates phone, email and Linkedin marketing.
This results in a better chance of contacting prospects and setting up more meetings.
You get to work with dedicated lead generation experts, a vast contact database and an advanced CRM tool. All these combined expedite the lead generation process. Our Campaign Specialist can tell you more about how our solution works. If you’re open for a quick call to discuss, please send me the best day and time and your direct number.”
The ‘by any chance’ method is not a marketing strategy and it’s no way to build a sustainable business. Here’s the alternative.
5 Steps To Making Things People Want
1. Understand who they are.
2. Listen to what they say.
3. Watch what they do.
4. Understand who they want to become.
5. Make the thing that gets them from here to there.
When you’ve earned the privilege to be curious about people you care about serving, to listen to what they want, and to observe who they want to become, you don’t have to work so hard to make them pay attention to what’s on offer.
Image by Daniel Gregory.
The Easy Way To Create A Mission And Vision Statement
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
There’s something beyond skill, talent, investment and resources that powers the most successful companies, and that’s a clear sense of where they are going and why. When you have a compass it’s not only easier to get to where you want to go, it’s also possible to take people with you.
I’ve written previously about how to write your mission statement, but since it’s easy to get confused between mission and vision, I thought I’d break it down.
Your mission statement describes why your company exists—it serves as both a guiding light for your team and a public statement of intention. Your vision statement describes your future impact—the result and effect of executing on your mission. In their simplest form a mission and vision can we summarised in a single sentence.
We do, make, create, serve, empower, inspire [ABC], [XYZ] will happen because we did [ABC].
Using this model we could describe the Airbnb mission and vision as follows:
Our mission is to build a community-driven hospitality company, that makes travellers all over the world feel like they belong anywhere.
Now it’s your turn.
Image by Michael R. Perry.
The Power Of What We Measure
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
It’s easier than ever before to create a set of metrics by which to monitor our progress and measure our success. Click-through rates, subscriber numbers, impressions and customer lifetime value are useful data points.
What if we measured our success by the results we delivered for our customers? Not what the customer did for us, but what we helped them to do.
How would that change the posture of our businesses, societies and the stories we both lived and told?
Image by Brandon Doran.
Who Exactly?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Who exactly is your ideal customer?
Was her mobile phone on her bedside table when she woke up this morning? Did she reach for it as soon as she opened her eyes? Or did she go for a run before sun up, then sip hot water and lemon as she scrolled through her Facebook feed? Did she catch the train to work, pack lunches before doing the school run, or head to the nearest cafe with nothing but her laptop and a full inbox.
How does she spend her weekends? Does she prefer the art gallery or a night club? What brings her joy? What does she put off doing until the very last minute? What does she care enough about to pay extra for? Where is she hoping life will take her?
Only once you have a sense of all of this, are you really ready to begin.
Image by Melina Souza.
3 Things Your About Page Must Do
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Your website’s about page is the place where prospective customers come to look you in the virtual eye and it’s also the most overlooked marketing opportunity you have.
3 Things Your Website’s About Page Must Do
1. Build trust.
Think about the reasons we visit about pages. Mostly we want to get a sense of the values of the person or company we’re considering doing business with and to understand what it might be like to work with them.
2. Make the reader feel understood and show how you can help solve her problem.
When you really know the audience you’re serving, you can speak directly to them about the kind of challenges they are facing and describe how you can, and have helped people in similar situations.
3. Tell the reader what to do next.
Without a call to action you’re just inviting the potential customer to leave.
Your about page must have contact details, links your store or services and to other resources on your website.
When you give prospective customers a reason to hang around a bit longer they often do.
UPDATE: Need more help?
The About Page Guide will take you step-by-step through the process.
Image by wee.
The Gap Between Saying And Doing
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
You will have seen this image of a goldfish making a courageous leap from his bowl on countless websites. It’s meant to convey a message about a company that’s not afraid to challenge the status quo, of course it’s now so ubiquitous, it does exactly the opposite.
Nobody in the marketing department got fired for using the leaping fish, and nobody who encountered it cared.
Our stories live in the gap between what we say and what we do.
The best brand stories by their very nature stand out because they feel new, and fresh, and true.
If you want something safe go with the fish.
If you want something meaningful go with true.
Image by McBeth.
3 Questions To Help You Find Your Niche
filed in Entrepreneurship, Storytelling
Look in the jewellery shop windows in any western city and you’ll notice the same trends—rings, bracelets and necklaces designed to appeal to what most people like the look of. Jewellery designer Megan Auman found her niche by marrying her talents as a metalsmith and designer, to create pieces that would change how a particular kind of woman felt, (not just how she looked) when she put them on.
Three Questions For You
1. What do the people you serve want and need?
You must get to know them almost as well as you know yourself.
2. How does the value you create best intersect with the worldview and desires of those people?
Understanding this helps you to make something people want, instead of having to make people want something.
3. What brings you the most joy?
There are a million and one things you can do, what is it that you must do?
Image by Nefatron.
The Marketing Should Be Invisible
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The vibration you feel when you plug your iPhone in to charge—that’s marketing. The texture of the sheets as you pull back the covers of a hotel bed, jazz playing on a good stereo at the cafe, the ease with which the milk carton opens, daring to have an insane mode—all marketing.
We spend a lot of our time trying to be seen and heard. Traditional marketing’s answer to rising above the noise is to create more noise.
The irony is when we do things so well that they are simply sensed or felt, we don’t even have to talk about them.
What’s your invisible marketing strategy?
Image by Ashraf Siddiqui.
Making Things People Want
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
We are buying fewer pairs of jeans and more yoga pants, eating less gluten and more coconut oil. Trends are not simply a shift in behaviour, they are a sign of a change in the story we want to believe about ourselves.
When you develop a product, service or platform it’s not enough to consider how it tastes, works or looks, you have to think about how it will make your customer feel in the context of who she wants to believe she is. Even when the Athleta customer is not practicing yoga, she wants to feel like she’s akin to the kind of person who does.
What kind of person does your customer aspire to be?
How does that person act?
How can what you create help her to be more of who she wants to be?
We make things people want when we understand how what we make wraps around their story.
Image by Matt Madd.
Why Most Marketing Fails
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
It’s hard to communicate your value if you don’t know what the customer’s definition of value is. Most marketing fails because the marketer doesn’t understand the story his customer wants to believe, before he tells the story.
So the real estate agent starts describing the proximity to great schools, without knowing if the couple has any children and the balloon seller brings one of each balloon—just in case.
Before you explain where you’re coming from find out where your customer wants to go.
Image by Auntie P.