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Day: April 19, 2021

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Best Practices Entrepreneurship Leadership Marketing Personal Development

The Buyer Is In Control. Does Your Marketing Reflect That?

Want to Hear About a Marketing Lesson Worth $883 Million?

 

 

The buyer is in control, but we’re still marketing as if that’s not true…

 

Mike Volpe was the original CMO of HubSpot, a leading tech platform for marketers.

He had been with HubSpot since he was their fifth employee. Volpe helped scale the company from 12 beta users to 1,000 employees generating $150M in revenue with a successful IPO leading to a $1.78 market cap.

Today, they’re valued at over $883M.

How did they do it? In part, they created content to attract and add value to their ideal client marketing companies.

Mike focused on creating content to help other marketers be successful.

 

By teaching potential customers how to be impactful in their messaging and marketing strategies, HubSpot became a tool, or resource, for best marketing practices taught by HubSpot.

The focused on teaching over selling.

 

 

“You don’t want to interrupt the content that people are trying to consume but be that content they want to consume. The buyer is in control, but you’re still marketing as if that’s not true.”

– Mike Volpe

 

Buyers Consume Information. Give It to Them!

If you weren’t reading this right now, you would be consuming information somewhere else.

Do you know how much time the average person is consuming information online today? Over 11 hours each day — that’s how much time.

US adults are spending more than 11 hours a day on average, or about two-thirds of their waking time, consuming media information.

Peter Katsingris, who led the report at Nielsen, attributed the rise of online streaming services due to the fact that it made it easier for consumers to tune in anywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People don’t want to buy from us. They want information to make their lives more enjoyable.

Attention is what we want, and it’s certainly true that it’s becoming more difficult to get noticed.

Customers now have a new level of control over how, when, and where we’re permitted to attract their attention.

 

Why it Pays to Create Content For Your Business

Companies that put out 16 or more posts a month receive 3.5 times more traffic to their website than companies that post four or fewer posts per month.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing attracts three times the number of leads than outbound marketing and costs 62% less.

Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than businesses without them.

 

 

But 94% of B2B companies are doing some form of content marketing and yet ONLY 9% rate their efforts as highly successful.

The truth is marketers have become more fixated on HOW to promote than WHAT consumers actually want or care about.

Ask most people what they think about marketing, and they will tell you it’s an ad or some form of promotion.

That’s where marketing has a slight marketing problem.

In the real-world, marketing is just the process of building relationships and satisfying customers. Customers who understand their buying power know they have many options.

 

 

The brands who win more customers are the ones who put their customers’ needs ahead of their desire to sell more stuff.

Promoting ads that don’t have a customer acquisition strategy is like throwing good money out the window.

Once we’ve nailed our audience’s interests there’s no shortage of tools to reach them.

For more information visit tylerhayzlett.com

 

Categories
Best Practices Growth Personal Development

If Your Company Uses Instruction Manuals for Its Products, You Must Read This

Too many businesses don’t give enough attention to what may be their most important documents.

Entering Appliance Hell

I recently bought an appliance. (I’m not naming either the specific appliance or the company from which I bought it.)

Before buying it, I had already read the dreaded phrase, “Some assembly required.” You probably know this really means, “Abandon hope all ye who purchase this product.”

Unless you have an engineering degree or a very skilled friend, you are doomed. I took a deep breath and bought it anyway.

The appliance arrived on the day projected, which I considered a hopeful sign. Still, I opened the instruction manual with trepidation which proved to be well warranted.

Eighty percent of the manual consisted of colorful drawings that showed various pieces connected but not exactly how they had arrived at this happy juncture. None of these pieces were numerically or alphabetically labeled or even named.

Basically, I had to figure out how the big squiggly piece connected to the narrow, sharp-edged one. The drawings did not reveal (nor did the text) that the assembler needed to press hidden bars.

Given this lack of identification, I realized with a fast-sinking heart that the manual wasn’t going to have the usual step-by-step guide, the kind that says: “1. Attach Part A to Part B.”

I eventually had to go online and watch videos on YouTube to learn how to assemble the appliance. The videos, not made by the company, were moderately helpful. With some difficulty, I managed to identify different parts and even assemble the machine without shedding blood. (This has not always been the case.) However, when I turned it on, I was greeted with deafening silence.

Then It Got Ugly

I turned to the laughably-named troubleshooting section. This was printed in approximately 8 point type. If you don’t know what that looks like:

If you can read this, you’re fortunate.

Note that it was typeset in gray type.

As a senior citizen, I felt profoundly insulted. I have friends in my age group whose eyesight gives them much greater reading challenges than I experience.

Consider this: One reason for the popularity of electronic reading devices is that you can enlarge the type. However, I also believe that people considerably younger than me would have had trouble reading this manual.

The worst thing about the design was that the manual had two BLANK pages. Any competent designer knows how to make the most of available space. Utilizing these two empty pages would have allowed the designer to enlarge the overall type size and produce a readable manual.

I finally got my appliance to work by hitting it. I’ve found this to be a proven method of repair.

Will I ever buy from this company again? No. I did write a letter of complaint.

A Twofold Dilemma

In an instruction manual, you consider both the information and the design.

Before the text goes to a designer, make sure that it provides the necessary information in an accessible way. Don’t rely on only your evaluation. Test the clarity of the information by having a range of potential users applying it.

When it comes to the design element, I have a caveat. One of the worst results of desktop publishing was that too many people decided they were designers. They weren’t. They still aren’t.

It’s like designing a book cover. You can have the programs and fool around with typefaces and images, but do you have the technical expertise and artistic eye to know whether you’ve designed a compelling cover?

I don’t. I hire a professional. I recommend that you do, too. When you do, ask to see instruction manuals they’ve designed. Make sure you like the way they look and that they present the information within usefully.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that the foldout instruction manual needs to be tiny. I cannot for figure out why the Instruction manual or sheet cannot be as large as the package containing the Item. This will allow the purchaser to read the print without using a magnifying glass, enlarging the paper on a copier, or using a phone camera/

You can make this process easier by studying instruction manuals. If you have some familiarity with their design, you can confer more effectively with the designer you choose. Below, I provide two resources that show examples of manual design.

https://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/usermanuals.html

https://www.pinterest.com/aangel84311/instruction-manual-design/

When you get the designed manual, go over it again. Make sure that the type is readable (without effort), that the illustrations actually illustrate, and that the overall presentation will help the end consumer to assemble and easily use the appliance.

Again, get other opinions about this.

If you follow all these steps, congratulations. You’ve done one of the most important things you can to encourage return business.

Pat Iyer is one of the original 100 C Suite Network Contributors and an editor and ghostwriter. Reach her at patiyer.com/contact.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Personal Development

Know When To Stop

No matter what you’re writing, if you get carried away by your own words, you’ll lose your audience.

Mark Twain told a story about sitting in church one day. The preacher was giving an inspiring sermon on the subject of a worthy cause.

He was asking the members of the congregation to contribute, and Mark Twain was so moved by the quality of the preacher’s words that he decided to contribute the $400 he had in his pocket. However, the preacher went on. And on. The longer he preached, the more Twain reduced the amount he intended to donate.

By the time the sermon ended and the collection plate was passed, he stole a dime from it.

I don’t know how true this story is, especially since Mark Twain was known for spinning tales. In the Tik Tok generation and the shortened attention-span world, its moral still applies: Keep it short.

Short is Sweet

We can’t figure out how to make our writing more succinct unless we understand what makes it too long. The following suggestion applies to all written forms: emails, memos, reports, speeches, articles, and books.

We fall in love with our own words.

Words can be magic, and we get lost in their spell. We may get excited about how one idea gives birth to another, and we want to write down all of them because they make such compelling sense in our own heads.

This rapture can have a dark side. Sometimes people think what they have to say is more important than what others want to say. They ignore time or word count limits. Unfortunately, the longer they talk or write, the less attention people pay to them.

We repeat ourselves.

Sometimes this is necessary. If you’re explaining a complex concept, you may need to use a range of approaches. The key here is to choose these explanations and express them in the simplest terms. Try them out on people who aren’t familiar with the subject. If they have “Aha” moments, you’ve done a good job.

In addition, check your text to see if you repeat the same words or phrases over and over again. Everyone has special fondness for particular words. We use them frequently without realizing it. Watch out for clichés. They trigger the inattention button.

We fail to zero in on the topic.

If you’re going to write or speak on the subject of the challenges that women entrepreneurs face during this pandemic, do not precede this with a detailed history of women entrepreneurialism. You may need to refer to this history for comparative purposes, but keep it brief.

We don’t do a sound editing job.

In a first draft, any of the previous errors can weaken what one has written. You can save a lot of time if you catch them prior to the editing stage, but if you didn’t, now you need to tighten up your writing and ruthlessly edit it. Put the edited version aside for a day or so, and then return to it.

  1. Is it succinct?
  2. Does it say what it needs to say?
  3. Is it engaging?
  4. Is anyone going to steal a dime from the collection plate?

For some additional specific suggestions, see How to Harness the Power of Brevity in Your Writing. 

Pat Iyer is an editor who delights in working with authors to streamline their writing. Contact her for help by using the contact form: patiyer.com/contact.