Author: remap_content_admin

Choose your own adventure:

1. skip ahead to learn what an infoslogan is
2. read on for an example of when to use one

Eventually, you may split your single product into a suite of multiple products – almost always 3, in my experience((If you don’t have a product yet, make one. Even if you think of yourself as a services provider. Make things.)).

I’ve been through this exercise multiple times in the past year with clients – each a B2B tech firm combining targeted positioning and emerging technology to solve a business problem in a new way for the same audience. 

So this is the pattern: start with one, your flagship product, sell it for at least a year or two, then balkanize the one into three.

Some basic principles:

• This is the process of retiring one product and creating three new ones
• New products often begin as “features” of the flagship product
• When some customers are more interested in a feature of your product than its core functionality, that’s a good time to balkanize it((No one in the digital world says “balkanize”; I’m just a history geek who drank Bosnian Slivovitz (apricot brandy) with an Albanian warzone-journalist in late 1991; I got a graphic lesson on history repeating itself in the Balkans and so I look for opportunities to use the word 🙂 )).
• To be clear: 3-tiered pricing is not the same as a 3-tiered product line, each at a different price. Don’t confuse tiered product pricing with having multiple products. 
• A second-order consequence of having multiple products is you have to do more branding and marketing homework((On the opposite end of the spectrum, 37Signals went from managing 5 brands to one. They started with a product called Basecamp and made new products that were separate, like Highrise, but later sold off the other products or merged them all into one – thereby merging their corporate branding and product branding into one entity: Basecamp. Definitely worth it if you have a bestseller on your hands; but, hey, they are at it again, creating a new product brand))
• Don’t stint on the homework – offer a little bit more information than your customers want, so they are reassured that there’s deep thinking behind the product.
• As you unveil your new products, also rewrite and redesign your website, creating a new company tagline that reflects your new status as a provider of multiple products
• Name your products and, sometimes, put a little trademark symbol after them™.

If you read this far, you deserve a free brand messaging hack: bolster the brand identity of each new product by making sure you give it what I call an “infoslogan”. An infoslogan is a concise, utilitarian description product description that feels and looks like a normal slogan.

Enjoy your weekend,
Rowan

 

With the right targeting, you can run a Facebook at 2 people.

You can get out a pen and paper and write down 10 emails, then upload them to Facebook, then run ads right at those people (or at least a quarter of them). Now try it with 10,000.

You can run a video on Facebook, boost it, then run ads just at those people who watched at least 50% of the video. If the call-to-action is an invitation to watch another video, your odds are good.

That’s not to say you should go out and run Facebook ads; that’s a marketing tactic and I don’t know what your marketing strategy is.

In MeatBall Sunday, Josiah Wedgwood is cast as the first marketer. But it wasn’t until the early-middle of the 20th century that people began to think of themselves as “marketers”. They were employees of major US consumer goods manufacturers, conducting large-scale market research in order to improve products. Better tasting toothpaste. Soda cans with a more satisfying “ker-chuck” when you crack them open.

These early marketers improved “Four P’s of Marketing”. In order of importance: Product, Price, Promotion, Place. Nothing has changed since those 4 P’s were codified in 1961. 

Facebook advertising can teach you about a form of promotion that is usually called retargeting or remarketing, though I like “warm advertising”. It’s for people who already know your name, as in the Facebook-boosted video scenario above. This is as opposed to “cold advertising”.  

It’s obvious why Big Tech has made retargeting available on their platforms: it’s the way to monetize unrealized, unconsummated, partial interest in what you sell. So you can buy it on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon.com, Google properties, the App Store, Bing properties, and LinkedIn.

Whatever your marketing strategy, warm advertising is likely a desirable tactic – if you have done the work of building a long-term marketing program. It’s value-added on the core marketing functions: improving your product, cultivating your expertise, honing your pricing, crafting your messaging and brand identity, and creating a content marketing strategy that inspires.

If all that stuff is the cake, warm advertising is the icing (just like SEO).

What’s your path to a place where warm advertising makes sense, adds value, and lets you tap all that unmonetized interest in what you do?

Best,
Rowan

Somewhere back in the 90s, I lost the only competitive tournament I’ve ever entered – Magic the Gathering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. My friends and I had entered on an ironic whim but I still wanted the $50 first-place prize.

Every other tournament entrant was in their teens and 20s, except my first-round opponent – the very adorable 6-year-old daughter of the tournament organizer.

I took an early and dominant lead over the 6-year old.

But then she began to cry.

I felt horrible – that I’d even considered winning. What was I thinking? So I began to throw the match.

But as I started to deliberately lose my lead, the little girl began also began to blatantly cheat. Maybe she had been crying because she was so competitive? She slipped very powerful cards from a pile on her chair into her hand, gleefully accelerating my defeat. I was soon the first to be eliminated from that 90-person tournament. I wondered for a moment whether I should have told her dad she cheated but now I am glad I didn’t. Who cares, it’s just a game.

And anyway, I got something out of it. I didn’t get a prize-sum but I didn’t get a zero-sum either – I got a story I’ve told a dozen times over the past 20 years. And it even gets a laugh, at least if my audience has been imbibing. Well worth the $10 entrance fee.

Jonathan Stark told a similar tournament story the other day, though he was vanquished by a man named Tony who plays Karate, not a cheating 1st grader.

Like Jonathan, I don’t think there have to be winners and losers to every aspect of life – and as you and I both know, there can be many winners from business activities. And many ways to win.

One color of people in the US will not get less because another color gets more – it’s the exact contrary, in fact. All lives don’t cease to matter because of the crucial principle that black lives do matter. 

The next time you write a story about delivering your products and services to a happy effect (call it a case study if you want), I’d consider talking about how everybody who played won – even you.

Have a great week ahead,
Rowan

 

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn’t get the hang of the story, simply missed the point that it is a collection of short stories.
– James Webb Young

Fair point by James Webb Young but what if you have to tell your own story about what a word means? Jane Elliot never let a dictionary tell her the story of race, whiteness, or racism; as a result, her beliefs are valuable and important in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. 

Here’s how to play this game yourself.

1. Make a dictionary in which you redefine the most important words to your business. What words are in your tagline, your headline, your business name? Or what words do you often find yourself using as you talk about what you do? Now – how do you define these words? Do you rely on “the dictionary” (as if there were only one), Wikipedia, or Google? In other words, do you let other people describe your important words, or do you describe them for yourself?

2. When you define your important words, notice as you do so whether you get ideas. Make a list of those ideas. Even if they are just little ideas.

Example of a little idea: Seth Godin wrote today that it helps to say “typical so-and-so” instead of “average so-and-so” because typical encourages you to narrow down the so-and-so to a median, not a theoretical, abstract composite (“The typical Southern California parent, not the average one”). 

A little idea but a useful one, so make sure you collect those kinds too.

3. Now that you have a list of ideas that came from defining your important words, try writing about them. Or make them the topic for your next podcast.

Now here’s the important part – a month or so later, use the same idea again. Any idea that you can mine to create multiple pieces of content might become what you could call a business belief.

Content marketing isn’t about having a list of things to write about, a list of prompts. This type of blog post, 225 blog posts ideas, contains 0 of your ideas.  It contains prompts – which are useful if you’re starting out, or stuck, or need a jolt. But like freehand writing with your non-dominant hand, this is merely an ideation hack. Because not one of those 225 ideas comprises your business belief system.

Every belief system defines God in its own way; it doesn’t relinquish such an important word to others by saying, “I dunno, Google it”.

Content marketing is about cultivating a unique set of your business beliefs to write and speak about.

Have a wonderful weekend,
Rowan

 

With apologies to my international readers who don’t get US sports references: the Universe has staged an amazing half-time show for the pandemic. 

But this isn’t a game and while gallows humour helps me, at least, deal with frightening times, it’s not really that funny. If you take everything from someone, including their last breath, where’s the silver lining?

There is none. We thought it was hard to keep building, keep selling, keep delivering when it was just a terrifying global pandemic. And it was.

Now what – when the entire world order political order wobbles? When it’s Faux Pax Americana.

The same thing – marketing is a long-term game and so are our businesses. And for what it’s worth, the US economy isn’t going anywhere; that should bring some stability of spirit to you, wherever you are in the world – if you play “the long game”. Facebook created enormous value for at least a billion people by being in business now for 16 years; it didn’t sell despite offers. It wasn’t just any startup.

When you hire a content marketing agency to write your blog, you get a checkerboard, a grid of boxy blog post teasers, usually between 10 and 20. They are solidly written and spell-checked. Keyword-enhanced. But they are forgotten because there’s no personality there and hardly any point of view.

But here’s how to do content marketing right: Profiltwell.

Profitwell is a hybrid consulting/software company that helps SaaS and DtC subscription companies get max value out of their recurring revenue business models. And if you take some time to read their blog, you start to understand why – their world is full of experts, personalities, blog posts, videos, interviews, podcasts, data visualizations, analysis. These aren’t tacked on to their product, they are part of the product. Marketing is the creation of products that the market wants ((In the 4 P’s Matrix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) proposed by marketing theorist E. Jerome McCarthy, the very first decision a marketer makes is product design https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Marketing-Managerial-Jerome-McCarthy/dp/B000MJI89O)). For years Profitwell have done this kind of marketing. They’re playing the long game.

Relatively soon as compared to the length of an average life, the pandemic will end. The riots and protests will end. And hopefully, the legacy of US-American slavery that is the modern-day “alt-right” will also end. And what will your content marketing look like when it does? Better I hope, but to get there we have to keep making little steps forward, day by day.

To your health and safety,
Rowan

 

The core function of marketing is to notice things about an audience of people that others don’t or won’t pay attention to. That’s hard for an audience as big as the US, which is a partial explanation for the protests and even the fiery riots. 

In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell traces the antagonism-policing en vogue in most major US police departments((there are about 12,000 federal, state, county, and municipal police departments in total in the US, each independent from one another – but a handful of the largest municipal police forces (LAPD, NYPD, etc) account for the vast majority of police – and police misconduct)) to well-intentioned but heavily flawed public policy research conducted in the 1970s and 1990s. The research essentially OK’d the use of signals/patterns to determine whether someone under observation is up to no good.

But the core principle of the book, supported by ample research, is that we rarely have any clue whatsoever what other people, let alone strangers, are thinking and feeling. Even though we all believe otherwise. This is as true of KGB, MI5, and CIA operatives as it is of the town cop in Ferguson, Missouri.

But people love the role of a poker player, looking for tells. Gambling other people’s money, in this case.

Marketing, on the other hand, requires us never to assume we know what our audience is thinking – until they pay for it.

That’s why the central question for your business becomes, “what is your audience happy to pay you to do for them?”

My best,
Rowan

Sales “call” is a misnomer because once you hit 5 figures, you might need more than one call, often several. Collectively, I’m referring to multiple calls as your sales conversation.

I’m no Grant Cardone, but here’s what I think a sale conversation should look like, based on 15 years of practice. 

1. Conversational discovery

If you ask many in sales for their favorite book, they’ll say SPIN Selling, which calls for conversational, consultative sales conversations. You talk 20% of the time and the prospect talks 80% of the time.

The only effective way to induce that scenario is to ask the right question, one after another, which is where the handle SPIN acronym comes in. It’s designed to help you differentiate between the four types of questions to ask (or not to ask).

Situation
Problem
Implication
Need-payoff

Let me highlight one of the book’s motifs – do not ask many situation questions, such as, “What products do you sell?” or “where is most of your team located?”. Ask anything but the S questions. Your situational questions can be researched or asked beforehand by email or some kind of web form.

Instead, ask problem, implication and need-payoff questions, such as, “Why is it a problem that you’ll get fewer conference referrals than pre-pandemic; how will that change the perception of your business, and what do you need to do as a result – what will be the payoff from this new course of action?”.

2. Analysis of fit

“I’ve listened to you and based on what I understand, I have this solution for you. It’s for you. You can have it if you want it; I’m happy to explain more and/or walk you through our informational deck. if you don’t want it, not a problem.”

OR

“I’ve listened to you and based on what I understand, I don’t have a solution that’s right for you. What I have is unfortunately not for you. 

What I can do is refer you to a colleague or tell you what I would do if I were in your shoes.”

3. Proposal offer

If after your prospect understands your solution, you can suggest, “When can I schedule a time to review a few different ways we can approach this? I can put together a proposal or us to review”. This is your proposal, which you always review in person (ie live); a proposal is like a young child, never let it out of the house by itself.

4. Price guidance

But before you commit to that follow-up meeting, you mention a price because inevitably that’s what:

• your prospect wants to know
• you want to know

Why go to the work of creating a custom proposal and statement of work if you don’t know whether your price(s) will be acceptable?

Forget about value pricing for a moment, because value pricing is a function of convincing inbound marketing and you may have none to speak of. Just focus on fixed pricing that’s not strictly based on an hours-worked calculation. Be ready to name a price range based on what you’ve learned in your real-time conversation(s).

Et voila, that’s the framework for setting up a proposal review call where you offer options that the customer will understand for prices she is comfortable with. No surprises. 

Or that’s the general idea, at least; it might be messier in real life and not in the right order.

And it might get a lot cleaner if you productize and price some of your services. 

My best
Rowan

 

The beginning is nigh – of unlockdown, of major tech conferences going virtual anyway, and of thousands of new business models, new careers, new companies((“the beginning is nigh” comes from a chat with a friend and reader of this list who also observed that our job as marketers is to transform our clients, “from Frumpy Lumpy with a broken kazoo into the Pied Piper for their industry!”)). 

Shortly before the last economic crisis, I remember the fear of leaping from someone else owning my work (employee) to me owning it. I remember putting it off for a couple of years, calculating and recalculating my options and my budget. The risk stayed the same no matter how much I dallied.

I wish someone had told me then what I know now: the most reliable way, in the long term, to reduce the risk of owning your business is to transform from being a consumer of content to a producer of it. That you spend less time on the IPad and the phone, and more time on the keyboard. 

How do you do it – how does anyone do it? When you design a content marketing strategy, the output is an editorial calendar. Every one of you should have one – even if you’re still working for someone else; especially if you someday plan to work for yourself.

My editorial calendar is simple but ambitious:

1. 3 to 4 issues per week of this newsletter and the revised and copyedited blog posts that go with each issue.
2. Producing one audio recording per week; that’s been a long, painful process for me but it’s happening. I’m finally getting started have started – I feel the itch.

That’s not everything I create but it’s all the content I put into the market on a regular basis ((Real artists ship,” and yes, they do have to ship something, or else they’re not artists. But they don’t have to ship everything they know. That’s because they’re artists, and they’re not a shipping service.
– Bruce Sterling)).

Producing this quantity of content nearly every daily is probably too much for most of you who run a business. I know it feels as though it is. I think it’s a good idea, at least temporarily, but I also acknowledge that most of you will never do it and I don’t see the point of haranguing in vain. 

But you have two or three good alternatives to daily publishing – and two pretty bad ones. These will help you and your business get started producing your own content marketing:

1. Good- decrease cadence
2. Good – decrease volume
3. Ok- decrease involvement 
4. Bad – do nothing 
5. Bad – fake it for a few months, then revert to 4

Decreasing cadence is an excellent alternative to daily publishing but much harder than it looks. But some business owners get it done.

Dries Buyteart has published a blog over the last 14 years which mostly consists of writing about once or twice a week. He uses his blog to question and set the vision for the enormous Drupal project he created. His blog regularly creates substantial and important comment-thread conversations. He also uses it to influence the worlds of open-source software, enterprise software, and startup B2B software.

He’s managed to do that while leading Drupal (which has 10s of thousands of software developer “contributors” from around the world) from a hobby project to one of the world’s biggest open-source software products. Meanwhile, he starting and sold a billion-dollar venture, Acquia. Among other things.

Dries was able to do all this because of his content marketing practice, not in spite of it.

Another excellent model of weekly-cadence content publishing is the prolific SEO authority and entrepreneur, Rand Fishkin, who has published an important, thoughtful, and influential blog all while creating and launching SparkToro.

But publishing longer content pieces on an irregular basis takes enormous self-discipline and itch.

What’s easier is decreasing your volume but not your frequency. Most attempts at short-form blogging fail – except for this and one other I know of – so this is about Twitter and LinkedIn 

In both cases, the bar is still higher than casually posting to those platforms:

• you start the conversations
• you constrain the subject matter around your points of view
• you say something helpful to a specific audience
• you do it with consistency

If it’s not scary and pushing out of your comfort zone, you’re not pushing hard enough.

Qwil CEO and founder Johnny Reisch is a master of short-form posting on LinkedIn. I don’t know Johhny’s story as well as I know Dries, but Qwil is a good product that solves the problem of invoicing, payments, and accounts receivable for independent contractors. I have had only good interactions with the people he has on his team. And Qwil has evolved rapidly into a B2B payments platform and Johhny seems to be a good steward of the 100+ million in VC capital that’s been entrusted to him. 

Like Dries, he has achieved all this because of, not in spite of, his content marketing practice.

The trick is finding your footing – I hope one of these two paths will work for you.

Best
Rowan

The goal here on this newsletter is that each issue gives you one small idea that will aid your marketing and your business. This is partly because I hate to waste people’s time. But it’s also because effective marketing is down to lots of little, small ideas, the kind followed by exclamations such as: “Fantastic point”, “Ahah!”, “Yesss – exactly”, or just an involuntarily smile. 

You need 1000s of little ideas like that to design and execute a successful marketing campaign. They’re worth a lot more money than big ideas.

If you’ve ever run a Google Ads funnel, you know that it’s not something you “design and turn on”. It’s the exact opposite. You turn it on, then you design it – weekly or daily. An ad campaign that is not refined iteratively and frequently is a complete . waste . of . time. Don’t deprive it of its little ideas.

The passage down below, however, from Edith Eva Eger’s The Choice: Embrace the Possible, revolves around more of a big idea: that within your own mind there is either imprisonment or freedom – and you get to choose which you want. 

Is that a new idea? No. Is it the first time you have heard it? Probably not. It’s not like Eger hasn’t appeared on Oprah. Or others touting the same message.

But if you understand how this woman arrived at this idea, it becomes new. Her story of survival – both of Auschwitz itself and later of her own “concentration camp of the mind” – makes it a fresh, new idea. Contextualize everything.

Step 1 is to read it as is because it’s beautiful and like other passages I’ve written about, it cannot be improved on.

“Whether you’re in the dawn or noon or late evening of your life, whether you have seen deep suffering or are only just beginning to encounter struggle, whether you’re falling in love for the first time or losing your life partner to old age, whether your healing from a life-altering event or in search of some little adjustments that could bring more joy to your life, I would love to help you discover how to escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be. I would love to help you experience freedom from the past, freedom from failures and fears, freedom from anger and mistakes, freedom from regret and unresolved grief-and the freedom to enjoy the full, rich feast of life. We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible. I invite you to make the choice to be free.”((Again, this passage comes from Edith Eva Eger’s The Choice: Embrace the Possible, from the final page of the introductory chapter, “I Had My Secret and My Secret Had Me))

Big ideas can and should be applied to multiple contexts. Step 2 is to read it again but scope it down from your life to something less important (but still important): your business. A hack for doing so is to try these substitutions here and there:

• life = business
• person = business person
• falling in love = finding your focus
• life partner = area of focus

Now imagine delivering this message to your favorite client – the one who believed in you first and signed you to that significant contract, the one that made you feel like your company was an important part of their business.

“I would love to help you discover how to…”

From here you can take it 100 directions because now it’s possible for your business to be something different than it was last year, and without discarding your unique expertise and intellectual property.

Choose to invest in content marketing, to believe that it can work. Choose never to bill hourly again. Choose to build a permanent, ongoing marketing program that becomes part of the DNA of your business.

My best,
Rowan

Here are a few written accounts of waves:

• In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave (2005)
• The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow (1980)
• The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future (2017)
• The Fourth Wave: Digital Health (2017)
• Coffee – The Fourth Wave: A fresh roasting revolution (2018)
• The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education (2020)
• Riding the Fifth Wave in Higher Education (2018)
• The Sixth Wave: How to succeed in a resource-limited world (2016)

1. What’s going on here? Why do publishers of Big Idea Nonfiction love the word “wave”  – so much they reuse ordinal wave titles?

Maybe because a wave is a boost of energy, a rush, a surge, a swell, an outbreak. In other words, it’s partly thrilling and partly scary as hell.

No one controls a wave, it just happens and all you can do is observe it, try understand it, and dive in. You can play in it idly, like an otter, or let it thrust your business forward.

Authors of the books listed above didn’t create their waves – they noticed them, understood them, and named them.

2. Steve Case’s distinction between Second Wave and Third Wave Internet businesses is relevant to many of you – you’re playing in between and among these waves.

Second Wave Internet companies ignore rules and regulations and let us find, organize, and share. That means more information, ideas, and even love – that’s amazing, at the right dosage. But they still feel like things you use “when you’re online” (Google, Basecamp, Skype).

Third Wave entrepreneurs will take the next step: challenge the world’s biggest sectors that most affect daily life – health, education, food, energy, and transportation. 

But to do so, they’ll need to build industry partnerships and navigate public policy.

If you provide consultative services, you’re already thinking like this because you know it’s not always about solving problems with software – yet you still know how to leverage it.

3. No one person starts a wave, but you can give it a name if you notice it. As I write this and you read it, there multiple unknown waves.

Positioning exercise: the business you have, your particular service or product you sell – name an idea wave that it’s part of. You can pick a wave someone else has identified or make up your own.

Enjoy!
Rowan