I bought a Halloween costume for my dog today.
Of course, it’s not really for Woody. Woody doesn’t celebrate Halloween. In fact, it’s quite likely she doesn’t even know who Superman is. The costume is for me and the people around me.
There are more gatekeepers involved in purchasing than you might realize.
I just had an interesting email exchange with John, and we concluded that this is often the target market.
You’re busy trying to sell a service or a product or an idea to lazy people in a hurry.
Lazy, as in not willing to do the work to create long term benefits. Lazy as in not willing to read the instructions, follow the manual, do all the steps, invest the time in the research. Lazy as in willing to buy the first choice that’s ‘good enough’ as opposed to finding the best choice. These are people who will spend five minutes to find a parking space one minute closer to the mall.
And in a hurry.
In a hurry because they jump to conclusions, don’t read to the end, and most of all, most of the time, search for a shortcut.
Lazy, in a hurry and in search of better are often contradictory ideas. Doesn’t matter. We don’t have to like it, we just have to acknowledge it.
The great news is that in every market, there’s a subset of geeks and nerds that are neither lazy nor in a hurry. Start with them.
Seven years ago at Yoyodyne, we started work on the Yoyodyne Engine for Pages, a free program that would automatically optimize landing pages. I’ve wished for something like that out loud more than a few times since.
Here it is, from, who else, Google: Website Optimizer – Adwords – Google. Thanks, Corey, for the tip.
People hate weasel words. We can smell em from a mile away. So don’t use them.
Construct your claims so that they are true without them.
Delete extra words that don’t make your claim more true.
"Oldest remaining building…" is just another way to say, "Oldest building". A building that no longer remains isn’t a building any longer, right?
"Only Brand X gives you Termintops®." Well, of course that’s true, because Termintops is a registered trademark and you’d sue anyone else who used the word!
Be vivid. Tell a story. Don’t be bland.
But [most of the time] avoid using [carefully selected] weasel words that [sort of] dull your story.
Marketers and designers will be quick to tell you that marketing and design are critical to the success of any venture.
That’s why it’s so sad/disturbing/surprising/wonderful to discover that so many successful ventures were created by amateurs. Yes, they were professionals at something (coding, perhaps, or raising money or managing or even selling) but the marketing and design was not created by a ‘professional’.
The list is long, and runs from the Boy Scouts to Google, from Nike to the New York Yankees.
One possible lesson is that marketing is easy.
The other, more likely lesson is that marketing is way too important to be left to professionals. Every person is a marketer, and anyone crazy enough and passionate enough to start something is definitely a marketer. It’s not great programming that turns one Net company into a success while another flounders. More often than not, it’s about how good a job the amateur running the marketing and design did.
I never bothered to print out boarding passes in advance… after all, the machine at the airport takes about ten seconds.
Here’s the thing: at some airlines, the machine stops working 30 minutes before your flight. Leaving you at security to watch through the window as your flight takes twenty more minutes to board and leaves without you.
Tip 1: print your boarding pass out ahead of time.
Tip 2: if you forget, have them switch you to a later flight, then run to the gate of your original flight. Ignore them when they tell you that you’ll never get on. I did.
We shouldn’t need to share travel tips. "Have a good flight," he says sardonically.
Howard Yermish reports:
This evening, my 4-year old daughter came downstairs for some ice cream.
When the commercial for the Little Mermaid DVD came on, she said, "We don’t
need to see that commercial. Don’t they know we already bought that movie?"
And she was right.
Google took a bunch of apps that were already done and turned them into a "suite" for campuses: Google Apps for Education.
Sometimes roll your own isn’t as popular as the blue plate special. Thanks, Imal, for the link.
Kelly writes to let me know that every entrepreneur needs a theme song. I’ll take it a lot further… every organization needs one, especially ones where marketing matters. So does every job seeker. Theme songs are the black holes of marketing–supercondensed memes under enormous pressure, putting a whole bunch of ideas and emotion into a tiny space. Right now, there’s a lot of Sly and the Family Stone going on with the Squidteam. Do you have one?
While we’re at it, you probably need a scent as well. Kurt Anderson reports that the New York Times now has a perfume critic… and then recommends Christopher Brosius, who has even figured out how to put to the scent of snow into a bottle.
