Entries

Wishing you a year full of good luck and good deals. May your life be blessed with peace and prosperity in the new year and all the years to follow. Happy new year!

That’s the message I got today from probably my favorite contractor of all time, Joana, from Manila. By the way, if you ever need a fabulous part-time executive assistant, let me know and I’ll make a referral.

Aside from acknowledging the plain fact that success in business is partly about luck – in the short term – here’s what I loved about Joana’s message: “and all the years to come”.

There’s this number range that keeps bouncing around my head. It’s about 5 years. Consider these three common business remarks and observations:

1. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle, a technology, language, or technology platform usually stays hot and leverageable for about 5 to 7 years. ((https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/5-trends-appear-on-the-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2019/)) Java, 3-D Printing, Ruby on Rails, iOS, the list goes on. Many platforms, such as Salesforce, stay hyped for longer, but the 800 lbs automaton-gorillas like McKinsey and Accenture dump cheap offshore labor on them and they cease to become leverageable 
2. “Referral chains tend to decay over a period of 6–9 years” – David C Baker. And David wrote that about 11 years ago, so I am going to cut the range down to 4 to 7 years because job tenures are shorter than ever. ((Job hopping is on the rise https://www.nbcnews.com/better/business/job-hopping-rise-should-you-consider-switching-roles-make-more-ncna868641)) Your former clients and coworkers referring you – this depends on them not quitting their formal career and starting a yoga studio in Costa Rica.
3. “People overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years” – Bill Gates.  Cut that range in about half and you have: about 5 years.

This last observation should be the motto of every content marketing agency, by the way. And for that very reason, the five-year range is where the highest focus of your marketing strategy lies. 

I’m all for short-term marketing and a balance between inbound and outbound marketing. But the tricky part is that those don’t exist in parallel. A marketing strategy should tell you what to do next month but also set forth five-year goals.

To be specific: what will you do on Thursday, Jan. 2nd, 2020 that will create warm, inbound business opportunities in the fall of 2025?

This is a content marketing question.

In the meantime, I’m also wishing you a year full of good luck and good deals!!

Rowan

You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology
– Steve Jobs

This was Steve Jobs off-the-cuff response to getting trolled by a techie who tried to call him out for removing LDAP from the Mac operating system. Does anyone remember LDAP? I didn’t think so. We remember the liberating experience of using Macs, especially in the pre-Windows 7 era.

This customer-first mantra has become product design 101.

But what’s 102? Where does the customer experience start? The answer is that it depends, but let’s assume that it often begins at price. In other words, it begins with figuring out the price. Cost. Investment. Of what you’re selling – of what it will take, as one my subscribers has put it, to transform your customer from Frumpy Lumpy with a broken kazoo into the Pied Piper for their industry.

Have you ever written a 20-page proposal and put the price near the end? Have you ever reviewed a 20-page proposal and skipped the entire thing to get to the price first? Yes to both here. And it’s the same effect when reviewing web pages for products and services offerings. The pricing is a frame of reference for everything else you have to say about your solution. And it’s usually one of the first, if not the first page you visit on a website.

Quick side note: “investment” has become such an over-used term that it has begun to feel pushy and “salesy”. Consider just saying “cost” or “price”; say the term that people naturally say, rather than the term you think makes them more likely to buy.

If the customer experience begins with price, then isn’t the pricing page itself an excellent place to start to design your product? 

I’m working with assumption here, however: that pricing – done right – is more than just a number. It’s the number plus everything you get for it, the most important features, timeframes, caveats, and details. This is an excercize in compressing complexity into a very small space.

And if you are offering multiple price-tiers, pricing becomes even more complex. Three excellent examples:

1. Active Campaign: https://www.activecampaign.com/pricing/ 
2. Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/pricing
3. Meg Cumby https://megcumby.com/work-with-meg/

As you can see, whether you are a lean tech company, a multi-billion dollar global software company, or a solo consultant, a pricing page is much more than a few numbers.

And it’s a great way to define your products (and in Meg’s case, her productized services).

Take action. Get out the wireframing tool (ie the pen and the paper), draw your website, writing Plans and Pricing on the top, and name some prices – then justify them. You have just started to redesign your product.

Even if you have never talked about your pricing in public (and never intend to), this exercise might teach you something about what you’re selling and make it easier to talk about it.

Have a great weekend,
Rowan

• to the question’s presupposition that you can make an ideation loop effective (that’s a non-answer but I’ll return to it)
• to creating an ideation journal – and to otherwise developing the ideation muscle, a la James Altucher

• quantitative social science research
• quantitative “business research” (aka “market research”)
• convincing, non-quantitative testimony based in a body of work everyone agrees is excellent
• unstructured individual research (this is what most of us do in our work and daily life; it usually starts with Google.com)

Using at least two of the forms of research is what makes an effective ideation loop.

It’s not everything, but research is a sine qua non of an ideation loop. Here’s the complete list: 

• Firms which create an emotional connection are more financially succcessful
• Among the most successful firms (20% growth over three years is their threshhold), the trend is to conduct market research and use it in content marketing

The classic 1926 theory of process from Graham Wallas is still widely cited and used. It includes Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification stages. Research since Wallas has defined Preparation such that it includes problem finding, and more specifically, problem identification and then problem definition (and re-definition).

• define a problem in small pieces
• conduct structured research around (broad and narrow)
• try hard to solve the problem, to the point of exhaustion
• ignore the problem completely, and let the subconscious contemplate
• let a solution come
• present the solution to other people
• repeat

“Drayton Bird knows more about Direct Marketing than anyone in the world.”
– David Ogilvy

Drayton Bird is still alive, well, and working, too. He runs his own lean marketing practice after selling his original agency to Ogilvy 45 years ago, then serving as the global chairman of Ogilvy Direct((Like Young & Rubicam, Ogilvy was eventually was acquired by WPP, along with 700 other creative agencies and counting. WPP’s founder Martin Sorrel has also praised Drayton Bird’s wiles)). You can tell he’s brilliant if you read his books or watch his videos; you’d never guess he’s 82.

Checklists are systems. Surgeons use them as a way of injecting care and quality into repetitive tasks ((The book to read is Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto)). Airline pilots use them. And so does Drayton Bird.

I’ve read Drayton’s newsletter and books for enough years to know this isn’t the only copywriting checklist he uses, but this one’s useful for you – for  how to think about express your positioning to the world:

1. Lead with the biggest benefit
2. Immediately expand with the other benefits
3. Give specifics, facts and figures
4. Give proofs and testimonials
5. What may happen if you don’t act
6. Recap / summary
7. Ask for action

This is an effective formula – for direct marketing. Because it relies on tacit psychological triggers that influence our behavior every moment of every day. ((The book to read is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini. Seriously, read it. Even if you hate the idea of doing your own marketing, read this book to understand just how pervasive psychological manipulation is in our daily lives. Not to say it’s all evil, but it acts on us regardless and by understanding that you’ll know how to deal with it and make better decisions. Also, it’s just an interesting book.))

Therefore it may be more applicable to positioning your products, as opposed to positioning the brand of your business.

If there’s a spectrum of psychological pressure in marketing copy, direct marketing is on the high end. On the low end is what we call “brand marketing” nowadays (David Ogily called it “image marketing” 40 years ago).

If you removed checklist items #4, #5, #6 and #7, you have a checklist much better suited to brand marketing. Although the facts, figures, and proofs (the results) – those should be part of brand marketing too, once you read deep enough.

Which approach should you use to express your positioning as web copy? 

• It depends
• Both
• Direct marketing, in the near term
• Brand marketing, in the long term

It depends on your business goals, the nature of your products and services, and frankly, on your personal taste.

Have a great weekend,
Rowan 

[Update, October 2020 – I no longer believe in the positioning decision (singular). Instead, I think of positioning as an ongoing mindset that lets you make positioning decisions in your marketing]

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

So said one partygoer to another in The Great Gatsby. True, isn’t it? It’s a close cousin concept to the comfortable anonymity that large cities bring.

Keep Jordan’s wisdom in mind as you refine the positioning of your business. Because the economy we do business in is an infinitely big party. It’s getting exponentially bigger, too, as indie experts and entrepreneurs chip away at the massive creative, consulting, and technology conglomerates that have commandeered so much of the business world’s spending money over the last half-century.

So by all means – feel free to evolve your positioning – and to do so in public. Over and over. Caveat: rolling stone, no moss (moss being domain expertise). But you will accumulate knowledge as you go regardless.

Hang on a second…

What exactly is positioning?

A couple of definitions of positioning before talking about making positioning decisions. One is X for Y –  I do X thing for Y audience.

You can extend that a little by talking about what problem you solve for Y. And how your X is a little different than other people’s X.

Jonathan Stark (no relation to Ned) defines this as a Laser-Focus Positioning Statement (LFPS) and offers this exercise:

I’m a _______ who helps _______ with/to _______. Unlike my competitors, _______.

Let’s plug in Salesforce, with 35,000 employees:

Salesforce is a CRM-based suite of SaaS software products who helps large B2B sales and marketing teams with managing complex sales pipelines. Unlike its enterprise CRM software competitors (used to be), Salesforce is a SaaS CRM product and has other cloud marketing tools that add value to the CRM.

Now let’s plugin BrainCheck, a Digital Health startup with less than 35 employees.

BrainCheck is a cognitive neuro health firm that helps clinicians whose patients are at risk of dementia with proactive diagnosis and monitoring. Unlike its competitors, BrainCheck uses proprietary AI and other emerging tech.

You can also easily plug it in for a company of one. ((Have to cite the Paul Jarvis book here, Company of One)).

Rowan is a marketing consultant who helps B2B tech firm to define themselves. Unlike competitors, Rowan leverages agile marketing ideation.

The trick in all cases, though, is that your audience of potential customers sees you this way.

Most people just think of Salesforce as a CRM and that’s it. Their positioning struggles to establish themselves as being seen as the largest marketing cloud provider.

For Salesforce – and for all of us in the business of complex creative and technical B2B expertise – positioning is a never-ending evolution. That’s why I don’t the expression “making the positioning decision”, as if it were a solitary event.

It’s becoming more of an every 2 or 3 years thing, as the business landscape mutates more and more rapidly (at least in marketing).

Anyway, if you really have no idea what your  LFPS is, or if you do but you want to change it, here are a few concrete steps you can take to evaluate potential alternative positioning options. These go deeper than the three-part Venn diagram of “What Do You Do Well, What You Love, What People Need”.

For each positioning concept you are interested in:

• Count its audience-size. For example, want to help Rachels in business? Calculate how many women are named Rachel in business in your part of the world
• Evaluate the competition for that audience. How many other businesses are competing for the same audience? In the bloody red competitive ocean, competitors are everywhere. In the blue ocean, there are no competitors. Hence, consulting for women named Rachel is what you call a “Blue Sky Strategy”. ((Blue Sky isn’t necessarily preferable to a Red; most experts recommend a “Slightly Red Sky” strategy. I think it depends on all of these considerations taken together. ))
• Estimate the demand and urgency – for each audience, how much demand is there, how urgent, how long-lasting? Just because your count reveals a large audience doesn’t mean there is a demand for you you do from them.
• Know your learning curve for a given audience. How much expertise do you have for each? The 10,000-hour theory as promulgated by M. Gladwell has been rejected by the person from whose research it was derived ((The book to read is Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, by Anders Ericcson)). So maybe you don’t need 10,000 hours to become an in-demand expert. But what do you need?
• Look inward at your own interests. This is the What You Love circle in the three-part Venn diagram referenced above
• Evaluate risk. Your appetite for risk – and concomitantly, your capacity for risk. 

If you want to dive really deep here, Philip Morgan offers a book, a course, and coaching around this process. Quite fascinating stuff – just don’t waste too much time perusing NAICS codes.

And remember – you’re at a big party. Be bold in your positioning and you will find intimate conversations with those who need what you do.

Enjoy,
Rowan

I’m pretty in love with the idea of content-strategy-positioning which I touched on yesterday. You are what you talk about. But also what you eat – as in research.

In fact, there are several other ways to exhibit your positioning. Here they are, in order of importance:

1. What clients you choose to work with. Or seen another way, what clients you choose not to work with ((If I show you a list of 100 potential leads, can you choose just 3 you want to work with))
2. How you design and deliver your content strategy
3. Among prior clients, what successes you choose to publicly post mortem. IOW, what case studies you do (this is sort of a subset of #2)
4. What you choose to research
5. What you choose to learn/read about with respect to your work (sort of a subset of #4)
6. How you present your products and services
7. How you write your profile positioning (your online profiles, your website, your email signature, your slogan, etc). Advertising falls into this category, too. 

Now you can see why I call “profile positioning” (#7) a hack – looks a little flimsy against the others, doesn’t it? To be fair, it’s a crucial and sometimes very powerful hack. But a hack it is – at least for expressing your positioning.

I like profile positioning though, as a method for making a positioning decision. Everyone should try this (if positioning is an issue for you – for many of you, it’s not; your positioning naturally evolves over the years).

There are many more complete ways to make the positioning decision, however. 

I’ll explore them in another post because I have a bone to pick with some of the consultative wisdom on this that I’ve run into. One piece of advice I see out there that doesn’t sit well with me is to pick an “industry code” – from NAICS ((The NAICS stands for North American Industry Classification System and is a joint project between Canada, the US, and Mexico. The US Census Bureau publishes it here )).

Viewing your clients through the lens of NAICS is an interesting ideation exercise that can give you all sorts of interesting data (total number of prospects nationwide, median headcount, etc). But the problem is that it’s a highly theoretical framework developed by economists that doesn’t map well to … reality. For example, it can’t grok this trend: the de facto blurred lines between B2B and B2C business, lifestyle, marketing. Each individual person is a business now. ((A somewhat Dada-ist yet valid example comes from LinkedIn status update maestro Anthony English, who refined his positioning from, “I help IT professionals become less awkward in business” to, “I help Rachels in business”. Yes, he means any person whose name is Rachel. Because why the hell not? 🙂 ))

A better evaluation framework is: is there a conference about where your clients convene? At conferences where your clients convene, is there a pattern of a certain kind of popular conference session? Could you add to or improve on it?

But here’s an even better evaluation framework: can you design a two-year content strategy, for a given positioning, that speaks to your prospective customers and their friends? 

Kind of a trick question, because you kind of don’t know until you start creating the content unless you’ve done something like this before.

But the point is that one of the deepest ways to express your positioning – designing a content strategy – is also one of the best ways to help you make a positioning decision.

Talk soon,
Rowan

One thing I have learned from web copywriting for tech firms – company owners often hide the company’s true positioning statement inside of About page bios.

These little gems of copy usually about halfway down the paragraph, where they start talking about the companies they love working with and know a lot about.

The original book on positioning discusses the value of positioning soft drinks (Coke vs Pepsi), car rentals (Hertz vs Avis), and other consumer products. To boil it down to one sentence: “become the no. 2 brand by being markedly different in the mind of your customers.” If Coke is red, be blue. That’s pretty much the entire book.

Fast forward 40 years to 2020 (almost), to creative and technical expertise businesses like yours and mine, and this advice is pretty meh.

Who is the market leader in my space or yours? No idea. What color are they? Also, no idea. But I know that every possible color is taken. According to LI Sales Nav, there are 9 million people whose role is marketing and 1.2 million “Computer Software” companies.

So “become #2 by being a different color” doesn’t really apply. In Purple Cow, published 22 years after Positioning, Seth Godin basically just restate Al Ries’s, “be different than the leader” positioning advice.  He also, however, stipulates doing so by going “mini-viral” and not relying on advertising, a newish idea at the time but not too relevant today either as virality has (a) lost its value and (b) continues to favor consumer products (movies, shows, soaps, etc.)

The idea we can still apply to our businesses today is that positioning is occupying a place in someone’s mind. To be specific, it’s when your client or their peer decides that you occupy a business niche. It won’t be a long-term place, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be a conclusion they arrive at independently when they doing anything other than talking to you directly.

They need to say, “I looked at your X and I realized that your business basically is focused on helping businesses like mine”. This is equally true for product firms or for services firms. Essentially, you want them to conclude that you might be a good fit without ever talking to them.

Think about the ways that can happen; someone reads your:

• email domain name in a cold outreach email, and looks it up
• profile on LinkedIn, Upwork, Clutch, or Dribbble
• byline when they see you guest on a podcast or a blog
• website homepage, or your bio – through a trigger statement

How long does that last? Again – not long, not without a serious content marketing program. 

But positioning for outbound marketing, at least, doesn’t need to last that long. It just needs to last until you talk to them on the phone. That could mean a few days or a few weeks. You might call this “profile positioning” – where all your online profiles, your website homepage, and your LinkedIn bio all agree with each other that you focus on a particular business niche.

Once you get this short-term, outbound-focused positioning in place, you can focus on extending it through content marketing. You don’t build on your positioning by tweaking a statement or web copy; you build on it creating a body of content that supports it.

But first things first.

Take action. Scan your online bios across the web for a sentence that talks about the companies you typically work with by describing their commonalities. Take that entire sentence and put it on your homepage in an H1 tag.

That’s a start – reply to this email and lemme see what you came up with!!

My best,
Rowan

Seth Godin said about a year ago that there were two kinds of marketing:

There’s the kind that no one can possibly like. The popups, popunders, high-pressure, track-your-private-data, scammy, spammy, interruptive, overpriced, overhyped, under-designed selfish nonsense that some people engage in.

And then there’s the kind that inspires us, delights us and brings us something we truly want. ((https://seths.blog/2018/08/two-kinds-of-marketing/))

I’m done with the first kind, at least when it comes to B2B content marketing. And I’d put most kinds of analytics in this category because they let us justify the popups and pop-unders and exit-intents.

And justify the time spent on them instead of thinking about and writing about how to solve our clients’ problems. 

Business considerations aside, the “selfish nonsense” kind of marketing makes life unpleasant for people.

But putting business considerations back in front of us, what good exactly does analytics do most of us – again, in the context of B2B inbound marketing based on content strategy? 

The truth is, analytics has its place, even in B2B content marketing; this isn’t black and white. 

• Analytics help a few of my clients, especially in digital health since there’s often a dual B2B/B2C solution and therefore marketing strategy 
• For some of your similar clients who might be entirely B2C/B2P, analytics are also fine
• For anyone running an ad campaign, they are crucial; and ad campaigns can work very well in B2B marketing
• Likewise, for cold email outreach, analytics are great, despite being highly overrated

So the important thing here is not to divest yourself of analytics, but to stop thinking with an analytics mindset, thinking about data that doesn’t really matter. Here are the metrics that matter to my business and probably to most of your:

• Sales conversations that take place
• Total number of paying clients
• Total number of new clients
• Annual revenue

There are probably a few more, but what do they all have in common? You don’t need analytics to track them. 

And that doesn’t even touch the really important metrics, like “how many of my clients’ businesses were truly transformed as a result of working with me?”, or “how many of the people I worked with will look back on the experience with fondness?”. But again, analytics don’t apply.

Take action. Try doing these two things, at least for a little while.

1. Turn off Google Analytics on your website for one month. Scary right? Not really, just submit your sitemap XML file to data and Google Search Console will still track the most important metrics. So will a few other free products, like Ubersuggest. I shut mine off 9 months ago and I’m never probably not going back (famous last words, hehe!). ((By the way, a nice side-benefit to shutting off web analytics is that your website loads faster.. my homepage often loads in 0.3 seconds on a $30/month WebHost ))
2. If you also have an email newsletter, turn off click tracking for a month. Why do you need to know who clicks links in your email – and how often? Maybe you have your reasons; I don’t and fortunately, MailChimp lets me disable link click-tracking. 

Again, the goal here is not to eliminate web or email analytics from your marketing. Or to eliminate data collection entirely from your business processes, especially if our clients need it and we want to live their experience. The goal is to get your mind off it and stop wasting time on it. If your content is good, people will let you know.

The fallacy is that analytics are an integral part of digital marketing. No, not necessarily. Analytics may help you in some business cases, but will they ever help you inspire your customers, delight them, and bring them something they truly want?

If you were brave enough to take this step already, reply to this email and let me know!

My best,
Rowan

PS. Thank you for enduring my deep dive in productizing services last week; don’t worry, not going to get equally obsessed with analyics this week. 

To fully hammer productizing services into the ground, I have a final incentive for you to think about doing so. Then at the bottom of the email, I share resources from people who know more about this than me.

The final incentive to productizing services is based on this premise: if you’re not using marketing to improve your solution, you’re missing an opportunity. 

This is the problem with lead or demand((as an aside, it’s can help to think of a lead not as an anonymous person but as a unit of demand)) generation, per se, as a way of thinking about marketing. If you think of marketing as only about improving your leads, you discount the importance of improving your solution (the product, the customized services, the consultative advice, or…. the productized service). ((This is true of all forms of lead generation, even ABM (Account-Based Marketing), which can be intricate, strategic by itself, even elegant, but is usually just a form of outbound lead generation.))

Which should never be part of your MO as a business owner.

Because – Captain Obvious speaking here – by improving the solution, you make it more valuable and can make more money off of it – reduce customer churn, improve your pricing, improve your conversion rate, etc. Or put another way, so you can create more impact with it. So you can change things more profoundly.

Productizing your services is not the only form of marketing that will help you improve your solution. ((The other two are deep content marketing and customer research/surveys. The latter is self-explanatory. By “deep” content marketing, I mean high-frequency and high-regularity publishing of written content)) But it is the quickest shortcut to doing so – if you do it right.

Why?

Because productizing your services – such that you package low-friction sales and delivery into the product experience (which is some of what I mean by doing it right) – will make you think differently about how it can help your customers students. ((By the way, Seth Godin has said that if you can’t stand marketing, think of it as education, of yourself as a nerdy teacher, and of your customers as your students)). That’s because in order to facilitate low-friction. low-touch sales and delivery, you have to keep things short and to the point. The 30-page proposal is not the right mindset.

You also have to think really carefully about what people need that your product provides. You can’t put all of your expertise into productized services; not even close.

And unlike purely custom consulting, a productized service will almost never solve as many problems. Just as we expect enterprise software to solve only 80% of customer problems.

So what is the priority problem and how do you build that into your product?

Now you’re selling something that is only ever a partial solution. You have to be OK with that and talk about it as such by being more precise in your thinking about problems it solves.

Those of you who create a product ladder out of your expertise may still sell completely customized one-off solutions at “the top rung of the ladder”. And that’s more than OK. But you’ll think differently about that top rung of your solutions ladder too.

Time for some ASCII artwork!

Think of your solutions as a ladder, with your content marketing at the bottom rung, customized consulting services at the top rung, and products in the middle rungs. 

Et voilà!

|____| top rung $$$$$ – custom services, strategy, expertise
|____| top-middle rung $$$ – full-day training workshop
|____| middle rung $$ – audit and discovery
|____| bottom-middle rung $ – custom training webinar
|____| bottom rung (free) – one-pager product (guide, cheatsheet, etc)
|____| very-bottom rung (free) – other content (blog, newsletter, podcast) (( This is a great mental exercise because it forces to presume that your content marketing has value; it puts pressure on you to make it worth reading and listening to ))

(Beautiful ASCII, right? Thank you, thank you)

Many of you may already provide workshops, audits, discoveries, webinars – and write a blog. But if you make them into products, you will, to underscore the points made above, write about them in a new way. You will name them, you will give them a slogan. You will anoint them with a brand identity.

The ultimate effect of your product messaging and copywriting work is that you will figure out how to solve problems with more precision, create more value, and derive more value for yourself.

This is because how you write about something is how you think about it. ((which is the point George Orwell made in his essay On Politics and the English Language, though I mined it for messaging hacks)). We’re not really knowledge workers. We’re more than that because merely selling knowledge is like the digital version of selling labor. We sell how we think about the knowledge we’ve acquired.

Take action. Get a pen and paper, and draw your on product ladder, keeping your customized services at the top and your one-pager product at the bottom. Refer to some of the earlier emails in this series for tips on how to do so.

As you do so, here are some other good resources to help you with your productization journey:

Productize Course & Community, also by Brian Cassel. I haven’t taken this course myself, but what a good example of Brian’s own expertise.

The Pricing Seminar, with Jonathan Stark. More about pricing but goes in-depth into creating a product ladder – I’d be sure to go into the course knowing what problems you want to solve.

Productize Podcast, with Brian Cassel. Discontinued but the old episodes are still really valuable.

Productized vs Customized Services, with David C Baker and Blair Enns. This episode reveals the counterargument to solely productizing, which is that you can make more money with customized services (and that the latter is always a massive pain in the ass). Again though, I’d suggest a hybrid approach, which will be a little easier if you are building a hybrid services firm.

Have a great weekend,
Rowan

Yesterday, I promised to touch on the content marketing dimension to the productization of services. To create things like cheat sheets, guides, checklists, and other “portable” and reusable documents. I think of this as “slideshow” content. In that respect, it has to be a little more impactful than just a good article or blog post.

It has to pass this test – is at least good enough to put up on a slide projector for a roomful of people to examine for 15 minutes? In that context, is it helpful?

This became a popular type of B2B marketing over the past 5 years, with mixed results. Some do it well. For example, digital consulting firms like Hinge and Backlinko and SaaS firms like Hubspot and WordStream make extremely valuable content products. And the production of new content marketing products is a part of a continuous content strategy.

To some degree (probably not to that degree), you should do the same. But focus more on value created than on quantity. You can, in theory at least, build a content marketing strategy on only one amazing piece of content per year; this is how some authors function.

I, for example, have done this by compressing my “mirroring” advice on how to respond to difficult business emails into a 2-page guide.

Starting point. As with everything in marketing, the starting point is the problem. Once you have that defined (here is a good place to look for one), evaluate what types of customers have this problem using our old friend, the ideation worksheet to productizing solutions.

Here (in the bottom quadrant), you are asking yourself, “Of all the potential customers who suffer this problem, what’s the group that suffers it the least (Low pain) and also has the least buying power?”

Because that group – at a given point in time – is more interested in the free product you’ll create than in the more expensive solutions, like fancier products, customized products, or custom services.

Don’t think of these groupings as permanent.

Your low-pain/low-buying-power prospect group is subject to the law that things change fast in our economy. But you have the chance right now, so to speak, to give them something that helps. Perhaps that will come back around in the future.

By the way, people use these things as email opt-in or lead capture devices (“lead magnets”). Not necessarily a bad thing, but your baseline goal here is to give away something for free.

Once you have identified the problem, the group, and have an idea for how to help with information, the next step is to write an email to one of those people with your information. Your goal is to transform the recipient of the email in some way, and you should describe the end results of that transformation. For example, “you write perfect replies to important business emails”.

Ending point. That email will form the corpus of your free content product but you’ll have to cut it way down to make it work as a one-pager guide or checklist. Entire books have been written on presenting slideshows, but here’s the main idea: few words as possible and plenty of white space.

If you’re not a visual designer, consider hiring one to maximize the helpfulness of the product: this can make it easier to read, easier to remember, and easier to take action on the advice you package into the product.

Probably everyone on this list should have at least one of these – if you make one, reply to this email when you are done and let me take a look!!

– Rowan