4 Actual Useful Marketing Tips...
And 2 other things
Hello Gobbledeers!
Housekeeping
Last week’s newsletter - Insurance Marketing, It’s Not as Boring as You Think - was, based on the open rates, literally exactly as boring as you thought. Thanks for proving me wrong.
As I’ll be going away for the July 4th weekend (and the Canada Day weekend for my Canadian client), I will be very busy not thinking about writing this newsletter. You can enjoy (?) a podcast I’ll post next Wednesday, but there won’t be a newsletter. I know, it’s sad. Is this really what our forefathers fought for nearly 250 years ago? So I can skip publishing a free newsletter because of the holiday? (Answer: yes.)
Marketing Odds and Ends
Over the past few months I’ve kept a list of marketing-related stuff with the idea that some day I would write about those things. Today is some day. Here are some things:
It’s Hard to Say Goodbye
I’ve been involved in countless conversations over the years with software companies about positioning and targeting and focus, and approximately 100% of those conversations end with “well, we need to focus, but we’re not in a position to turn down prospects outside of our target, and of course we’ll continue to support the clients we have, and maybe we should open an office in Cameroon, etc.”
Financial startup Brex, in a move I can’t actually remember anyone else making, decided not just to stop focusing on its initial market - small businesses - it told those small businesses their accounts would be closed. That’s focus!
As you can imagine - because it’s the internet - the reaction was, um, mixed. But that’s why targeting & positioning is hard - anyone can pick a market, but picking which market you actively will NOT support is difficult. And it’s even more difficult when you already have clients in that market. Bravo for making the tough decision.
One Sentence Positioning
Approximately every single week I write something about how software companies do a terrible job of saying what they do, who they’re competing with, why they’re better, and quantifying those benefits (sounds like a fascinating newsletter, glad you subscribed?)
I thought this ad from the storage company Air did an amazing job of doing all those things in 1 sentence:
Who’s it for? Marketing teams. Who are they competing with? Google Drive & Dropbox. Why are they better? Because it’s made for creative assets. How much better? 520 hours a year you’re not wasting.
It’s 100% worth your time to come up with 1 sentence about your company that’s as good as that, then plaster it everywhere.
It All Starts with Content
Pricing technology company Profitwell just sold for $200 million. Bravo. Their founder did a Reddit AMA that talked a lot about how they got traction in the beginning before they had any clients.
This is a question near (and also dear, as many “near” things are) to the hearts of anyone who has started a company: If you don’t have clients, how do you get yourself some clients?
It’s also near (dear) to the hearts of companies that DO have clients, as we saw from Brex (above) - sometimes the clients you have aren’t the clients you need to have if you want whatever outcome you want.
It’s worth reading the full post, but here was their strategy:
When I show up to consult with software companies, I invariably discover that they’re doing far too many marketing tactics - instead of figuring out 1 or 2 things (more likely 1) that work incredibly well and doing as much of that as they can, they do a very small amount of 8 things. This doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work.
Does not.
Work.
I believe deeply in using content as the foundation of your software marketing strategy (as Profitwell did) because you can create a nearly infinite amount of content targeted to microsegments of your customers. Once you figure out how to accomplish this operationally, the sky is the limit.
The Best Gobbledy Is Financial Gobbledy
A friend in the financial world keeps forwarding me blurbs from company annual reports, because the gobbledy there is another level from what’s on company websites.
I was at a dinner last week with some ecommerce marketing people, and when I told them that I worked with software companies to help them with their marketing language, every one of them said something to the effect of, “I don’t understand what any company does.” Which is not good, since these are the people who buy software.
My friend in the financial world invests in companies and he wrote to me recently about a blurb in a financial report, “Literally no idea what they do.” Here is the blurb:
EPAM delivers end-to-end value to its customers by leveraging its advanced software engineering heritage with business and experience consulting to become one of the foremost global digital transformation services provider. We focus on building long-term partnerships with our customers in a market that is constantly challenged by the pressures of digitization through our innovative strategy and scalable software solutions, integrated advisory, business consulting and experience design, and a continually evolving mix of advanced capabilities. We support our customers while enabling them to reimagine their businesses through a digital lens. Our historical core competency, software development and product engineering services, combined with our work with global leaders in enterprise software platforms and emerging technology companies, created our foundation for the evolution of our other offerings, which include advanced technology software solutions, intelligent enterprise services and digital engagement.
Literally no idea what they do, either.
Better B2B Targeting through Paid Search Copy
Super tactical thing, but this article had a really useful tidbit for how to improve your paid search targeting by calling out your target market in the ad copy.
For example, if you’re targeting mid-sized businesses, you might include in the ad copy “for companies with 100-500 employees…”
Or if you find you’re driving too much unqualified traffic because you aren’t a $5/month product, you may say “Starting at $500/month” in the copy.
Small thing, but it can significantly improve your return on ad spend.
Readers’ Corner: I Miss the Octopus
Gobbledy has a lot more readers now than it did when we first wrote about the Octopus diagram, so for those who missed it, here’s a really nice Octopus graphic from Openfin that reader Nikki S. shared with me. Glad companies keep pumping these out. How else would I know that when you take Trumid and put it into the thingy that you get some Luminex out?
If you have some Trumid that you’d like me to post in my Luminex, send me examples at jared@sagelett.com.
Have a delightful holiday weekend. See you July 13th.