Author: remap_content_admin

Critical thinking is not how to think, as it’s most commonly described, but what to think, or more to the point – how to choose what to think about

This is, for me at least, the key takeaway from the famous “Water Speech” by David Foster Wallace. I think that DFW posits that awareness, in the mindfulness sense, is an effective mechanism for choosing what to think about. Awareness of the mind itself, this is critical thinking.

Bear with me, because this is related to how you think about marketing your business, which I get to at the end of this article.

A background in mindfulness helps here – knowing that its function is to let your brain be the sentry for not just thoughts that come into it, but feelings. Because life is far from fair and that’s sad, frustrating, enraging, etc.

Enough mildly annoying things can create terror or rage if you stack them up in the mind of someone not realizing that “this is water”, not aware of the monkey voice in its head that talks too much and the monkey heart in its heart that feels too much, too easily.

In contrast, great ideas are just combinations of 1000 small (but good) ideas – one of the great assertions in Bryan Collins’ The Power of Creativity.

Also known as, “that’s a good point” ideas.

But to let those good points flourish (and maybe form a great idea someday), you have to choose carefully what you think about, take the petty bullshit of daily adult life in stride.

With the help of absurd good luck, I engineered my life never to have to report to an office or do a commute as described comically and cynically by DFW in this speech.

But thoughtfulness-destroying tedium can encroach anywhere. Just as mindfulness can be skillfully deployed, as Thich Nhat Hanh asserts, “outside the temple”.

“I’m bored” and “I’m enchanted” can live right next to each other, that’s the thing about marketing. Enchantment is related to charming, which is to delight others while also feeling delighted.

Your business at some point brought you delight, I hope.

So tapping into that delight is a great place to start your marketing. Use David Foster Wallace’s critical thinking to get there. 

If you don’t have a conversion optimization strategy for SEO, SEO has become even more ineffectual than ever before.

That’s the takeaway from a piece Rand Fishkin has published what I think you could call a ground-breaking big data analysis. It has allowed Rand to once again take Google to task for selling out the promise of SEO, whereby Google helped create a content meritocracy in which valuable content gets attention and can create business value. 

The key takeaway: for the first time ever, according to data accumulated by Jumpshot, more than 50% of Google search result in either no click at all (searcher gets info needed on search results page) or in a click to a Google-owned property (Maps, Images, etc).

In other words, organic results get clicked less than half the time after a user executes a search.

I noticed Seth Godin referenced this article and applying it to his “freelancapreneur” audience: “If you’re an individual or business that’s hoping to be ‘found’ via a search, this is bad news.”

Just as I might try to apply it to my audience of B2B SaaS providers in “founders-wearing-many-hats” growth mode.

For those types of B2B companies selling complex solutions, no-click searches must be incredibly rare – how can Google capture the complexity of B2B solution idea on a SERP? And I’m merely echoing Sheena Schleicher here (thanks Sheena).

So for some audiences, I just can’t tell whether it’s bad news or not, based on this data. (Though on a larger sense, it’s bad news for all netizens benefitting from the open web).

Here’s another caveat: display advertising may still offer lower-cost-of-entry ROI than search advertising, for that same category of businesses – complex, tech/creative, B2B.

I’d still like to disintermediate Google and FB from that equation, of course, by finding out where to run ads using audience intelligence tools (SparkToro, BuzzSumo).

Speaking of which, this analysis is further evidence that integrating content marketing/SEO with other marketing approaches has gone from “good idea” to table stakes; baseline strategy.

One thing I took away from Richard Rumelt’s book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy is this idea that effective digital strategies almost always combine multiple ideas together.

Huge market share has been built not with proprietary IP but by seamlessly combining nonproprietary ideas in a way that makes first-mover advantage unassailable (example explored by Rumelt: IKEA).

So if you’re doing content strategy that is SEO optimized, what else are you doing to optimize that content for conversion into leads and customers?

Addendum: The MasterMind Questions of Benjamin Franklin

1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? Particularly in history, morality, poetry, physics, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge?
2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?
3. Has any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?
4. Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?
5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?
6. Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?
7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? of imprudence? of passion? or of any other vice or folly?
8. What happy effects of temperance? of prudence? of moderation? or of any other virtue?
9. Have you or any of your acquaintance been lately sick or wounded? If so, what remedies were used, and what were their effects?
10. Who do you know that are shortly going [on] voyages or journeys, if one should have occasion to send by them?
11. Do you think of anything at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?
12. Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since last meeting, that you heard of? and what have you heard or observed of his character or merits? and whether think you, it lies in the power of the Junto to oblige him, or encourage him as he deserves?
13. Do you know of any deserving young beginner lately set up, whom it lies in the power of the Junto any way to encourage?
14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws, of which it would be proper to move the legislature an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting?
15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?
16. Hath anybody attacked your reputation lately? and what can the Junto do towards securing it?
17. Is there any man whose friendship you want, and which the Junto, or any of them, can procure for you?
18. Have you lately heard any member’s character attacked, and how have you defended it?
19. Hath any man injured you, from whom it is in the power of the Junto to procure redress?
20. In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?
21. Have you any weighty affair in hand, in which you think the advice of the Junto may be of service?
22. What benefits have you lately received from any man not present?
23. Is there any difficulty in matters of opinion, of justice, and injustice, which you would gladly have discussed at this time?
24. Do you see any thing amiss in the present customs or proceedings of the Junto, which might be amended?

Great subject, dangerous question. Answer is no.

SaaS companies need one person responsible for all messaging. That includes messaging used in the product UX and in marketing materials such as the company website and advertisements.

Designing your product and designing the marketing around it should come out of the same continuous ideation process.

There is no significant difference between an X SaaS copywriter and a Y SaaS copywriter, but there is something to be said for understanding interactive user experience – but this is true of all copywriting. Copywriting is 20% UX.

There is a difference among copywriters mostly when it comes to knowledge of industry, of customers, tastes, sayings, etc. If you market to several demographics, you might consulting several copywriters with, again, integrated product marketing oversight.

I tried using Superhuman, a recently PR-blitzed  (Google it up against date of this article) Silicon Valley enterprise designed for people who live in their inbox. It costs $30/month.

Maybe that’s worth it, but I tried the free version of Superhuman, which is called “Gmail”, with various features and extensions enabled, and with – most importantly – 4 to 6 hours of usage training  (whether it’s self-training or not is besides the point, really).

AI-sorting of emails? Massively comprehensive keyboard shortcuts? Undo send? Open/re-open tracking, with device and geography built in? It’s all just so 2008, I’m drowning in nostalgia. (Is Superhuman  a ninnovation play or a marketing/branding play? Hmmm).

GSuites Gmail at $5/month looks an awful lot like Superhuman at $30. Posteo.de, a €2/month, looks a little more virtuous since, as an EU-born product, human rights and human dignity (and lawfulness) are baked in. A cocktail which tends to spur innovation (because happiness and ideation are linked).

I’ve been getting to Inbox 0 on most days since before Gmail existed 15 years ago. But Gmail has helped make that goal (efficiency and peace of mind, not emails-in-inbox count) more attainable.

But the point for builders of web applications and other software products isn’t that Google Already Did That (and you’re just re-labelling it and charging for it).

The point is, what results do your users get? As opposed to what they could get, if they knew how to use your product.

And the second point is, why do they get good results from your product.

The answer is massively dependent on those extra hours it takes to learn the product. Conventional wisdom: human-delivered services don’t scale. But think about that kneejerk line of thinking –  6 hours of precision training might scale the impact of your software more than product design or innovation ever could.

Training might be where innovation happens. I wouldn’t avoid it, I would pursue it.

I have no idea if actual Superhuman users get better results than they would get from another email client product assuming all other variables were equal. But I know that the distinction in the software world between products and services is pure literalist (ie wishful) thinking.

Conclusion: just because you find it tougher to price and monetize services than products doesn’t mean one or the other creates more value.

Almost every daily human experience is delivered through a combination of software-delivered and human-delivered value (or lack thereof).

If Superhuman lives up to its brand promise, it’s because there’s a human in there somewhere, helping it along, and not at scale. At least not in the short term.

Set me straight if I am off here (not an uncommon phenomenon).

Thanks,

– Rowan

June 11 2019

Relentlessly, I reassure my software industry clients that I have a tech background despite headlining my consulting business with dreaded marketing. In fact, the other day when I asked a client for access to their dev site, and they linked me to a github repository, wherein lived a roll-your-own CMS built in Jango… I almost decided to install it.

But that rabbit hole was sidestepped. I even wrote a WordPress plugin a couple of years to scratch an itch – not being able to easily see a list of all shortcodes instantiated on a WordPress instance.

I actually do know way more than I ever needed to learn about CMS software in particular, especially on the LAMP stack, and especially WordPress and dreaded Drupal.

Implementing the right software the right way is still the most important technology choice in business worldwide. And it’s done poorly by US businesses about 99.7% of the time). That’s equally true for $10,000 websites as for 20 million dollar ones – and I’ve worked at both ends of that spectrum on multiple engagements.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I found a compelling website on the one of the simplest CMS products (well, seemingly simple) in existence: Google Slides. Not a CMS, of course – this is a hack. And it’s a creative and bold one: inboxcollective.com.

I’m a Slides junky too and I have been doing this with pitch decks, proposals, etc., for a while. I’d been creating them in Slides and then exporting to PDF, then emailing said PDFs after, say, presenting them during a Zoom meeting – but that felt false. Plus impossible to correct errors.

So I just started sending people the Google Slides link, like this. As a matter of fact I’ve got a David C Baker style “client orientation manual” that is an evergreen Google Slides presentation.

But using it as website is next-level bold and creative, wow!

But beyond style points, and the point about thinking different, which is part of the Inbox Collective’s brand promise, this is about moving towards substance over syntax.

Yet it also retains of the mystery of, say, Alt Group, while still managing to actually speak at some length.

I would certainly not necessarily recommend this approach, just as I wouldn’t recommend you hand-roll a Jango CMS, or use Drupal 8.

But I would encourage you to use tools in a way they were not intended to be used. That’s part of the point; the other point is to sell a thing, not the packaging enveloping that thing.

Here’s a funny idea – doing anything meaningful without some kind of research.

There is no ideation without research. As a UX designer, technology consultant, and digital marketer for two decades, it occurs to me that good ideas come ONLY from research.

So it’s not just for the marketing department, which is an important thing to note (there is no such a thing as “horizontal specialization”, just knowledge accumulated; there is only vertical specialization – agree or disagree?).

But how to research? Especially if the goal isn’t so much groundbreaking science as it is the generation of good ideas in business, however you define that. How to structure research?

As you can see, by the way, someone is making me think about market research in a new way. Someone whose newsletter I subscribe to, in which he talks a lot about things like probability samples, convenience samples, and census.

For years meanwhile  I have asked this question: why is 30 supposedly an ideal sample size? I have faith that it is, to an extent, because someone I respect (a university physics professor with a math background) told me so.

“To get a meaningful sample size of anything, you need 30 samples”, this professor would say.

This applied to, for example, Salmon run data provided by “the core” (the US Army Core of Engineers), whose responsibility it is to manage dams and the salmon populations which traverse them. So to draw a meaningful conclusion as to, say, the 40-year trends of salmon populations, you would need to get data from 30 dams.

This seemed beyond absurd and still does. What if there are a total of 30 dams in existence vs 3 million? Well now I have partial answers: if the total population is 30 and the sample is 30, then your research takes on the nature of a census.

Otherwise, however, it is either a probabilistic sample or a convenience sample, a distinction determined not by sample size relative to population but by approach.

That still doesn’t explain why 30 is such a magic number. If you could help enlighten me with explanations (yours or those of others), I would appreciate it. Not afraid to read in depth on this either, so feel free to suggest your favorite statistics novel, especially if it features stormy and complex romantic protagonists.

Again, though, I’m not looking to cure cancer or to create more irrefutable proof that the governments of the world are destroying the planet we inhabit. I just want to cultivate insight into the people I help as a marketing consultant: tech entrepreneurs, with both SaaS and solutions revenue, with an international business scope.

I’m reminded (in a sort of all roads lead to Rome way) of Ogilvy on Advertising, who said, “talk to your customer”. What he meant was, statistically hygienic and large scale market research is nice and all, but you learn more talking to 5 real people. Not sure how that qualifies as science, but I’m sure no marketer  has ever (a) achieved similar results or (b) done so with the literary panache of an culture critic.

Anyway, I suspect he used some blend of science and artistry.

As I try to solve the sample size of 30 mystery, I’m looking to rediscover that blend for the digital era.

I haven’t written in a while so please overlook typos – also gaping flaws in logic, fluency, and style. Thank you,

Rowan

July 8 2019

You probably shouldn’t try to boil down everything in life to a checklist. But checklists are comforting. They answer the question, “what are the essential things I must do?”.  Last week at an event in New York City, I gave a talk that ended up, ultimately, being a checklist – a checklist for how to answer the question, “what do you do?”, in your marketing materials. You might call it a brand messaging formula and it encompasses positioning and unique value proposition.

I have talked about brand messaging elsewhere, where it was interesting to probe the branding of colonial-era Mexican cattle-ranching. I think it’s a useful concept because compresses a mid-sized idea into two words; the compression of your positioning and unique story into the smallest, most accurate, and most galvanizing words possible. 

If you do this with accuracy, you will always learn something new about what you actually do – and be able to express it better.

Words are events. They do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer.
– Ursula Le Guin

Speaking of positioning, our brand messaging checklist reads like a positioning statement – by design. So imagine someone comes to your company website and asks, “What do you do?”. Try telling them this:

1. I solve a particular kind of expensive problem
2. For a particular target market
3. By leveraging a particular kind of expertise
4. All with a particular, unique difference
5. Because of our relevant, human backstory
6. And because we have strong points of view
7. (Mirroring language/ideas of your audience)

The funny thing about the first two items on this checklist is that they are things you do, not things you say you do. I mean, you should say you do them, but first, you have to do them.

And this is one of my core beliefs in marketing – what you actually do, as in results gained for your clients, is always step one. Put less politely, if your product sucks, brand messaging and marketing is pointless. 

But let’s assume you do these things – that you solve a particular problem or kind of problem, that you solve that problem not for anyone, but for a target market.

If you do so in a way that creates value, then you really should trouble yourself to put that into words with accuracy. Because now you have the foundation of the answer to the What Do You Do question. I don’t mean at cocktail parties, or to relatives who basically reduce the entire modern digital economy to, “Oh, so you do computers”. I mean your customers or people who know them.

So on your website, business card, marketing emails, and other materials – even within your product – it’s vitally important to express what you do as a problem solution for a certain type of person likely to suffer from that problem remaining unsolved.

Of course, we are used to describing what we do with #3 – our expertise, hopefully. If you’re not good at it yet, it may be less an expertise and more of a skill or just an ability. 

Again, step one here is actually doing – cultivating expertise, that is. Then once you cultivate it, you can talk about why and how you cultivate it – and why it’s useful for solving a particular kind of problem.

At part four of the checklist, we come to a convenient delineation point, where we have described what Jonathan Stark calls the “Laser-Focused Positioning Statement” or LFPS. The last piece of the LFPS is about having and articulating a unique difference is a way of setting yourself apart from other who solve the same problem, for the same industry or audience, and with the same area of expertise.

Making Uniqueness a Part of Your Brand Messaging Formula

Unique differences are rare, especially in positioning. Most businesses claim a unique difference that is commonplace. For example, “We are different from other SaaS messaging apps because we use an Agile development process and are 100% mobile-first”. Neither Agile development nor mobile-first comprises a unique difference.

So you have to dig deeper and look at who your team is, who you are. And you also have to look outside of yourself. That work gives you true distinction: a relevant, human backstory that explains why you do what you do. And strong points of view. I think these last two pieces are necessary additions to the LFPS, if you are truly interested in understanding for yourself how you are different.

“What is your overarching point of view? What conventions will you challenge or dragons will you slay?
– Blair Enns, Win Without Pitching

Finally, mirroring. Mirroring is the behavior in which one person subconsciously imitates the gesture, speech pattern, or attitude of another. I suggest you cultivate this behavior as you examine the people you are trying to help so that you can be better understood.

Checklists and formulas have limited value, but this one might help you find the right words. 

Let me know if you have other ideas.

The process for describing what you do is as definite a process as the production of Fords. 

I ripped that quote off from James Webb Young, who wrote an excellent book called A Technique for Getting Ideas, which codifies “the” ideation process, which is based on leveraging the subconscious mind in combination with doing an absurd amount of research. 

As Gary Bencivenga said about copywriting, “You should know 7x more than you think you need to know.” This applies to all kinds of problem-solving undertakings in business, not just finding the right messaging. 

But it’s indispensable advice when it comes to finding messaging. If you want to describe what you do well, you should know 7 times more about what you do than you think you need to know.

Here’s a caveat or three, though: I don’t know much about how to describe what you do if you are an employee; I was never any good at that, maybe because I didn’t know what the question was: what do I myself do, or what does my company do? 

So if you are a full-time employee listening to this talk, YMMV. I am speaking to people who have some kind of stake in their business, whether it’s a few points or 100% ownership. 

Those of us who literally own what we do should be able to say what we do, who we do it for, the problem it solves, and what’s different or unique about our approach.

Johnathan Stark, the author of hourly billing is nuts and host of the Pricing Seminar, calls this the LFPS: the laser-focused positioning statement. Here’s the LFPS with handy merge tags.

We’re a [DISCIPLINE] who helps [TARGET MARKET] with [EXPENSIVE PROBLEM]. Unlike my competitors, [UNIQUE DIFFERENCE].

A simpler way to describe this is, “X for Y”: We’re a [DISCPLINE] who helps [TARGET MARKET]. 

What’s the problem? I don’t like this very much because it doesn’t specify the expensive problem.

Most SaaS providers and tech consultancies have this in common: they skip the middle parts, the target market, and the expensive problem. And they don’t even propose a unique a difference; instead, they propose a non-unique difference.

Or they propose a unique difference that is emotionally stale. If you can

I’m a messaging expert who helps B2B tech firms balance short and long term lead generation. Unlike most of my competitors, I use a unique ideation process that combines intensive research and subconscious contemplation.

Extend your unique difference with strong points of view

Going beyond describing what you do: hold distinct points of view. There’s a coach named Alberto Rhiel who does a fabulous job in describing what he does. Alberto is a coach and course teacher who helps life insurance agents create lead generation through by (a) developing professional talent and (B) instituting a specific kind of digital marketing funnel

That’s not a bad positioning statement. Actually, it’s a great one. But he doesn’t stop there; he has a story to tell that comes with a strong point of view.

Alberto grew up in a middle-class home attending a local private school in Houston, Texas, where he was an A student and the oldest of four children. He had stability and security. Until he was 9. When he was 9, his father died in a tragic accident. And unfortunately, Alberto’s father was the sole breadwinner.

But he had life insurance, so no problem – right? Wrong. The policy was badly written. Sloppily written. Negligently written.

And the life insurance company did what life insurance companies do – denied all the benefits to Alberto’s family based on a technicality. After a failed legal battle, and with infant children to raise, Alberto’s mom had to sell their home and move into a challenging, dangerous Houston neighborhood; private school and college tuition were out of the question.

So what is Alberto’s strong point of view? That no child should ever be denied a future because of a badly written life insurance policy.

And he’s making sure that happens, one life insurance agent at a time.

And if that doesn’t make you choke up a little, then you maybe you aren’t a very emotive person, which is OK. I know some of my readers are engineers (sorry couldn’t resist).

He has another point of view that might provide some comic relief: no life insurance agent should ever sell a policy over Thanksgiving dinner. Funny, but foundational to his definition of what he does: generate leads from outside the friends and family Rolodex. As it should be. By the way, part of how he does that is through leveraging paid digital advertising, which Max Bidna talks about.

So take Alberto’s example for your business. Reinforce your unique difference with strong, even emotional, points of view.

I’ll give you a few of my own. I believe that:

• I believe the messaging in your marketing should be a reflection of the messaging in your product or services, and vice versa. And I mean the actual words baked into the UI. Chris talks about this in his presentation.
• I view messaging and strategy as inseparable because a strategy is always expressed in words. I don’t believe that it’s possible to define a strategy without being able to write it into words that inspire action
• In the B2B tech space, I view the differentiation between product as services as semantics, ultimately. You use software to solve business problems; who cares how it’s delivered and priced? That’s not the point; the point is how it solves problems for specific targets.
• Independent entrepreneurs and experts have the ability to change the world by liberating global revenue from the global Fortune 5000, which takes 80% of worldwide GDP, with per-employee revenue of $400,000/year. 
• I view the act of helping entrepreneurs and experts tap into that almost limitless source of wealth by solving the dual problems of short term and long term lead generation.

Of course, when I say “of my own”, you have to laugh at me. There is no such thing as an idea of my own, ultimately. All of our ideas are ultimately combinations of pre-existing ideas. 

How to apply this with a real-life example. I have been talking to a SaaS startup who solves a seemingly age-old problem: CRM UI’s suck.

Has anyone else been in a services, sales, support, or marketing role – and been forced to use a CRM? Raise your hand? And did the word “forced” come to mind all too often? Raise your hand.

The number one obstacle to CRM adoption is not training or motivation, but usability. HubSpot sort of solves this problem. Ironically, even Salesforce 

What does it mean to describe what you do? If you could boil it down to its very essence, it’s the problem you solve. That’s the one piece you can’t leave out.

The scope of your definition is dictated by the context. Sometimes the context is quite literal, as in the case of LinkedIn, or Twitter, constraining character count. 

Other ways to talk about what your business does. 

I’ve been using the principle of positioning as a foundation for describing what you do; specifically “cross-hair positioning”, or what LFPS. Philip Morgan talks about