4 RULES FOR A BRAND MESSAGE
Developing your “umbrella proposition” can be challenging; it’s difficult to distill the value of your business down to a simple phrase that captures the essence of why you exist, but doing so is critical. Your content, your sales, your marketing, your product roadmap, your service offerings - everything - should be derived from and consistent with your core value statement. At synthesis, we’ve developed 4 rules to guide the development of a core value message:
Address a Benefit
It’s not about what you do, it’s about what you can do for me. Your value statement should speak directly to the potential customer and express the tangible benefit you can bring to them or their business. It’s the difference between “I make raincoats” and “I keep people dry”, the latter is far more appealing to the listener.Broad but Focused
Addressing a benefit can sometimes slip into a meaninglessly vague over-reach like “we make your life better”. Your benefit should be constrained by a hint of practical application or the HOW of what you do.Leave Room for the Future & Past
If our sole product is umbrellas, should we say “we keep people dry through the design and manufacture of the world’s most durable umbrellas”? Only if we’re sure we’re never going to expand into adjoining product categories like boots, raincoats, or an invisible force-field that repels rain. Additionally, if we formerly made umbrellas but have expanded into tents, should we say “we help people explore the outdoors through the development of the best camping gear”? To do so erases the brand equity, experience and value of our past. “We protect you from the elements with high quality apparel and outdoor gear” embraces both legacy and future product possibilities.Simple Language
No “inside baseball”:
(noun) - a figurative adjective meaning appreciated by only a small group of insiders or aficionados." It usually refers to a detail-oriented approach to the minutiae of a subject, which requires such a specific knowledge about what is being discussed that the nuances are not understood or appreciated by outsiders. - Wikipedia
Don’t fill your value statement with business buzz-words, industry acronyms, technical jargon or any language that couldn’t be understood by an 8 year old child. Not only is it limiting, since technical details change, but it suggests you don’t have a clear purpose other than the exploitation of a temporary business or technical opportunity.
These rules don’t build your value statement, in fact they make it infinitely harder to develop. But, when followed, they ensure that you’ve arrived at something meaningful, lasting, and which accurately portrays the reason your business exists.
THE ATTRIBUTION FALLACY
Attribution
noun (often attribution to)
Definition: The action of regarding something as being caused by a person or thing.
It’s nice to know what causes a particular outcome or event. Being able to identify causality informs our decisions; the pain of fire burning your skin is a lesson you only need to learn once before you decide to try to avoid touching it again. Unfortunately, most marketing programs aren’t as simple to understand.
Traditional marketing via ‘broadcast’ messages (television, radio, billboard, print advertisement) has always been difficult to measure, because while it’s clear that it can cause brand recognition, relating that recognition to actual sales that may take place months or even years later is at best an abstract art. The lack of causal clarity from old media is a big reason why the world’s marketers have been so quick to embrace the data and direct (single-source) attribution of digital channels like pay-per-click advertising. It seems so simple, a click has a cost, and a clearly traceable outcome (web visit -> conversion -> sale); some simple math, and…Presto! You have a reliable price-per-lead (PPL) average from your paid-search campaigns.
However, if you dig a little deeper you quickly realize that the single-source attribution of paid search advertising is a lie! Your PPL calculations are false! Does that mean we’re doomed to return to the days of guessing whether Mikey eating the cereal in the ad or Mikey supposedly dying from pop-rocks and coke ingestion in The Enquirer was the real cause for our uplift in Life cereal sales? No, but it does mean we need to take another look at the art of attribution in a data-rich world in order to understand the real value of our marketing efforts.
For example, they call it “Pay-Per-Click” advertising because you PAY only when someone CLICKS. But what happens to all those hundreds or thousands of additional times where your ad is shown but doesn’t get a click? Your brand and your message still gets directly within the sight of your target consumer. Ask anyone paying for signs, billboards, fliers, television ads or product placement; there IS value to having a brand impression even if it doesn’t lead directly to a conversion or sale. In fact, most people search more than once for a product or service they’re in need of, and the resonant effect of your ever-present brand is the reason you got the click on the all-important LAST search, not the first one. So, next time you calculate your PPL, be sure to include the value of the thousands of FREE billboard-like brand impressions your campaign got that may end up fulfilled through other channels.
But, it works the other way as well. Not only is paid-search delivering free brand impressions that lead to better long-term customer conversion across ALL of your marketing channels, but it is also stealing the credit for clicks that actually were ’caused’ by another activity. Paid search is an inbound marketing channel reliant on the customer taking action (entering a search term into their browser, map, or virtual assistant) and serves to fulfill the preference or need for your brand, product or service you created in other marketing channels. Most people don’t immediately pick up the phone when they hear a radio ad, but they do hear the brand; and, months later when they search for that service on their smartphone, they unconsciously choose the brand implanted by that radio ad.
Email marketing is another culprit in the fallacy. Cheap, repeatable, and traceable down to the open, click-through and ultimate outcome of each customer, email has become another highly measured and wrongly-credited channel for the modern marketer. I’ve worked with organizations that believe in a linear relationship between a single email blast and a sales outcome. “We sent the email to 5,000 targets and got 23 sales. If we send another one every day we’ll gain over 150 sales this week!”. Forget about the customer fatigue (and thus diminishing returns) from over-using the email channel, the reality is that the email rarely causes the sale. My inbox is currently being bombarded with messages from retailers highlighting the best Black Friday deals on the electronic gadgets I love. If I click through, was it the past relationship with the retailer, the highlight of a product I was already considering, the sale itself, or the email that created that outcome? It was ALL of the above, and there is little proof that I wouldn’t have bought had I not received the email. In fact, I may have purchased at full retail price, so other than costing themselves 15% in revenue they did nothing to affect my behavior.
All this is not to say that you shouldn’t use traceable marketing channels, nor that you shouldn’t study the data to see how to optimize your sales funnel. What it means is that you need to look at your outreach as an orchestra of influence, with each instrument adding to the emotional impact on your customer. Study what happens when you send an email without the radio ad, and try to correlate whether the combination of channels leads to better outcomes. Modern ‘big data’ systems give us the tools to perform multi-channel analysis; and while even it is not a perfect predictor of human behavior, it’s a lot better than the fallacy of single-channel attribution.
Single-Attribution digital marketing channels are, in fact, NOT single-attribution channels. Understanding their role in the multidimensional symphony of influence that creates a customer is the best way to get the most out of all of your marketing efforts.
HOW SEARCH WORKS (GOOGLE’S CHURCH AND STATE)
The Separation of Google’s Church and State
Make no mistake, the majority of the billions Google rakes in every year comes from selling an audience to advertisers. Any time a large number of people are viewing something: a wall (billboard, jumbo-screen), a sporting event (sideline signs, uniforms, hats, etc.), television (commercials, product placement) even the sky (pulled airplane banners, skywriting), there will always be a line of advertisers anxious to pay to gain access to even the brief attention of that audience. The larger the audience, the more dollars it commands, which explains the multi-million dollar cost to run an ad during the Superbowl.
So, Google would have nothing to sell without a large audience; an audience they build by organically providing the ‘best possible’ answer to any query you enter, whether it be quick access to a historical fact, or the location of the nearest pizza place. We live in amazing times, where the entire recorded knowledge of all human history can be accessed instantaneously, from anywhere, with a simple question typed or spoken into our phone! Google’s technology practices for determining the ‘best possible’ answer are ever-evolving and secret. Naturally everyone wants their website or business to be the best possible answer to virtually any associated search query, but Google has to prevent people from ‘cheating’ their way into prominent position. If a website proprietor can ‘game’ the Google search algorithm, Google ceases delivering the ‘best possible’ answer to our questions and we (the audience) disappear – and with us Google’s main source of revenue! Many have tried, and most have been penalized for trying to cheat their way into page position.
Google’s technology is imperfect, however, often failing to provide the best possible answer for local queries, especially when a business doesn’t have a physical address but rather operates out of a truck, home, or virtual office (i.e. mobile pet groomer, lawn/pool care services, consulting/tax services, etc.). The challenge for Google is to try to find a way to better surface these businesses without creating a loophole that can erode the purity of their search results. It’s no easy task, and Google won’t spend a lot of time discussing it publicly. Google has separated organic search from paid search with a hard wall, that resembles the founding fathers separation of church and state; both exist and both are important, but they are distinct and forever separate from one another. Google will happily discuss ways for you to spend more money or improve the click rates of your paid ads, but they go mute when the conversation turns to providing specific feedback on specific pages. They have to protect the sanctity of organic search so that we, the audience, keep coming to Google to get our answers. While it might sound impossible that the behemoth that is Google could be toppled, if you went to Google tomorrow to search for a place to order pizza delivery and started getting results from 3,000 miles away, you’d quickly start using Bing or wishing AltaVista made a comeback. Google’s entire business is built on the foundation of protecting the value of organic search results and thus the audience it can monetize with ads.
In order to be the best possible answer to the keyword searches you care about, your best bet is to be the best possible answer – Easy! Becoming the best possible answer is basically done by strengthening the relationship between your site and the keywords you care about by:
Matching content on your site to the keyword terms you want to target
Localizing that copy to reference your geographic position including neighborhood terms that may not be official town names etc.
Applying basic best practices for your title tags, metadata, site structure, and content
Refreshing your content regularly to demonstrate that your site is ‘alive’.
Claiming your Google+/Maps listing and verifying that the information (name, address, phone, hours etc.) for your business is accurate
Ensuring that that basic business information is syndicated accurately across popular web directories
Earning positive reviews
Being patient! It takes time for even small changes to bear themselves out and improve your page position!
The Reality:
It’s important to note that even with all of the best practices applied, no one can guarantee top page-one position for your organic link every time, all the time, against every keyword you care about. If someone makes that promise, they’re both lying and most likely employing ‘black hat’ or cheat methods that could eventually get you delisted from Google altogether. Google’s technology frequently tests and adjusts search results to better match and evaluate customer intent, so you might not ALWAYS show up against the keyword you care about. You should measure the preponderance with you appear in the results; which is what the majority of searchers will see. The physical location of a search, device (desktop, tablet, phone), method of search entry (text, voice search) and other factors also influence search results, so accounting for those variable is important in setting your expectations. At synthesis, we don’t focus on SEO optimization as a service, we focus on your overall marketing plan and recommend leading market solutions if we identify a specific gap in your organic, paid or social presence. Independence is our strength.
FRANCHISE MARKETING: ROCK STARS AND CHOIR BOYS
Everyone wants to be a rock star. The fame, adulation, and the nearly limitless ability to do, speak, and act any way you want is undeniably appealing. Being a popular musician means you have no boss to answer to other than the opinions of your fans; your job is to give them more of what they want. You write and play your music, then the world listens; if enough people like what they hear, you are rewarded with ‘customers’, along with the success and independence that accompanies acquiring lots of them.
Now that I’ve got you thinking about music, imagine for a moment you’re listening to a song from your favorite artist. You are singing along and dancing to the beat – now simultaneously press play on a song from another of your favorite artists. Then another. Get five of your all-time favorite songs playing at the same time; not in succession, on top of one another. Can you hear it? Suddenly you can’t make out the melodies of any of them, and the sounds that usually sooth, motivate, or move you blend into a cacophony of noise that only serves to irritate and confuse. Can you hear it?
That’s the sound of a lot of franchise marketing.
Successful franchisees want to be rock stars of local marketing, writing, playing, and performing to earn fans (customers) that will fuel their success. They’re not rebelliously breaking away from the franchisor; but, they own and operate an independent business and they suffer the consequences of failure personally. They can’t afford to be complacent and hope that a national strategy pans out, they have bills to pay and they need to acquire customers by whatever means necessary to serve that end. Sometimes, however, as with any rock star, success leads to excess, and the customers start to hear five songs or more layered on top of one another, five messages from five franchise locations or more clashing and weakening each other.
The franchisee’s can lose their voice when they forget that they’re not actually solo rock stars; they’re part of a choir.
Nobody wants to be a choirboy. There’s no fame or fortune in being one of dozens, hundreds or thousands of seemingly nameless and faceless clones all singing the same song. But, there is undeniable power in the sound of all of those voices working together to build a rich, and beautiful song. That’s every franchisor’s goal;
the network grows in revenue, size and satisfaction when the power of the brand acts as a tide that lifts all ships.
When the melody emanating from each franchise is the same, the cumulative effect gives customers confidence that they’re doing business not just with a good local provider, but also with a trusted, national brand that can serve them anywhere.
Everyone wants to be a rockstar; nobody wants to be a choirboy. The network is more successful when it sounds like a choir, but franchisees need to rock in order to protect their own business.
Perhaps it’s possible to be both?
Some franchise brands blend the two roles by providing enough autonomy to empower franchisees to control the style of their own music, while playing a melody that matches the brand. Each franchisee is free to work on solo projects that enrich their individual business – with varying levels of success, but ultimately return to play with their peers because that’s the true foundation of their popularity. It’s a bit like being in Genesis
What do you think? Can a franchise brand encourage rockstars to act like choirboys in order to create a more harmonious sound?
DON’T NAME YOUR COMPANY ‘HOOLI’
In the heyday of the internet boom, it was a necessity that your web startup have a name that was fun, sounded cool, and perhaps meant nothing. After all, we were all still figuring out what this wonderful invention of Al Gore’s called “the internet” was going to do for us, so best to take a non-descriptive name and figure out what you’ll actually BE as a business later. The high-profile success of
”Google”, “Yahoo!”, “eBay” and others convinced startups during the resurrection of the internet economy in the early and mid-2000’s that the best name is a ‘meaningless’ name. It didn’t hurt that [every-word-in-english].com was already being squatted on by those anxious to get rich reselling their domain acquisitions. Thus, the rise of the meaningless, made-up, mispelled, or otherwise random modern/internet business name. Of course, meaningless names pre-date the internet; “Haagen-Dazs”, “Xerox”, and “Sony” didn’t mean anything and went on to become massive companies. So, if you’re considering a rebrand or launching a startup, should you search for something like “Hooli” to be your brand? Probably not...
Don’t get me wrong; some of these names are great and have become household terms that you could hardly imagine being the same by another name. As such, most people presume that since seamingly meaningless names can take off, it’s not important that your name convey anything about the value or intent of your business. But that’s not necessarily the case; there’s a lot more to many of these names than you realize, and lessons to be learned in naming your business.
Take “Haagen-Dazs” for example. It’s completely meaningless. It has no translation to Danish or German or whatever other european language it might sound like. It is entirely made up, PROOF that a meaningless name can launch a massive brand! Well, not exactly. Just because the name is meaningless doesn’t mean it doesn’t SAY anything. The name was crafted in the 1960’s by the founder who was searching for something that sounded old, steeped in tradition, and crafted in high-quality. A recipe from Denmark that had been handed down for centuries. It works, you hear that name and it immediately sounds foreign, luxurious, old, and expensive. When you sell a product to the mass market, of universal appeal, and with an intrinsicly ‘obvious’ initial value proposition, like high-quality ice cream, your name isn’t that important. Everyone likes ice-cream, so you don’t have to worry about them not knowing what it is and quickly attaching the name to the product.
“Google” is a mispelled short-form of an actual word (googolplex) defined as a massive amount of data. It was an attempt to be descriptive, but ended up meaningless. It doesn’t matter, the name was fun, playful, left ample room for Google to become almost anything, and described a service (search) that the web needed desperately to be done more effectively than existing options. “Yahoo!” isn’t meaningless, Jonathan Swift had defined it in Gulliver’s Travels to mean "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." In both instances, the purpose of the name is to evoke a feeling; Google infers massive, all-knowing and expansive, while Yahoo! says irreverant, free, and edgy.
There’s a difference between meaningless and purpose-less, and every name should have a purpose, especially as your audience shrinks from ‘everyone’ to a specific type of buyer. You may have noticed a lot of businesses that take on a family name, which is meaningless, right? True, but most of these businesses add a descriptive suffix so that you know what they do; i.e. “Alex & Sons PLUMBING”. Getting found without people being able to instantly know what Alex and his sons actually do would be difficult. Why add an unecessary layer of abstraction to people knowing what your business does?
So what’s the point? There is no perfect formula for arriving at the right name, and often when you think you’ve found it, it’s already taken. But consider these concepts as you evaluate your ideas:
Evoke a metaphor, feeling, or descriptive term: You want people to think or feel something from your name. Even if it’s a meaningless word or common term, it should evoke your purpose, your unique value proposition, or intimate something about your approach as a business.
Consider adding a descriptor when the core name doesn’t categorize the business: You can free yourself from the contstraints of a descriptive name if you consider making your business category a modifier before or after your name. If you don’t fall neatly in an existing category like ‘plumbing’, revisit #1 and consider a name with as clear a relationship to your purpose as possible; you don’t want people to try to figure out a meaningless name in a non-existent space.
Evaluate against your advertising, sales & customer acquisition/interaction model: Perhaps the most important guideline is to think about your go-to-market strategy and the role your name plays. If you’re planning to invest heavily in mass-media marketing, you can get away with a more obtuse name because you’ll have a lot of exposure to build the brand recognition with customers. If, on the other hand, you’re acquiring customers through email and cold-calling, you have less time to get your point across. And, if you’re hoping to get customers online via INBOUND means, consider what your name would say to you if you searched for the underlying need.
For some examples, look at some of the businesses and products synthesis has named (or advised), most of which are descriptive without being literal, or inspired by a feeling/value of the business:
Centermark - putting the Franchise CMO back at the CENTER of his MARKeting operations.
SafeCentral - one place to go for completely secure online transactions.
re•currency - brining customers back for quick service restaurants.
texium - technical advisors to help you navigate modern business connectivity.
synthesis marketing consulting - Simplifying value and mission into a clear story, and communicating it to the world.
There’s no magic formula, and always exceptions to the logic outlined in this post. Naming a business is among the most difficult tasks, and isn’t really the key to success - it helps more to be GOOD at what you do ;-). However, have a purpose and think about what your name is telling people.
FRANCHISE FAMILY FEUD
Inspect a few franchise locations and you’re likely to find a great deal of consistency in branding, messaging, pricing, uniform, and even whether the bathrooms uses hand-towels or driers. One thing you probably won’t find, however, is a common franchise-wide approach to online marketing. It’s as though the last two decades of internet culture never touched the franchise business model. Which is odd, given the fact that most consumers search for and discover local services online, and that most franchise owners rely on online marketing as a critical channel to acquire new customers.
For decades, a franchise operator has made a promise to a potential franchisee, offering:
The Power of My Brand – Going it alone, you’ll never be as known, recognizable or trusted as you would be with the weight of a franchise brand behind you; customers trust the image the franchise has built through television, radio, print and network advertising and the promise that a large corporation stands behind their buying decision.
A Playbook for Success – You’re good at providing your service or product, but you don’t want the overhead, expense and headache of trying to devise your own strategies for pricing, promotions, execution, fulfillment, and more. I’ll give you my proven system for managing the entire business.
Support & Experience – It’s a lonely world out there, and having the support and experience of a full network of business owners just like you who are part of our franchise gives you a large pool of resources to call upon when you need advice or support.
It’s a powerful, effective and valid offer, and there is tremendous value to the local franchise owner to participate. Unfortunately, most franchisees are left to go it alone in the complex, constantly evolving and competitive landscape of online marketing. This leads to a fragmented and inconsistent online presence, damaging the brand of the franchise and tasking each franchisee with yet another difficult business issue to manage.
It’s not necessarily an easy problem for the franchise operator to solve, however. The pace of technology, and the challenge of trying to be locally relevant in each market without the resources to manage every franchisee’s online presence, has made this a daunting challenge. Still, most franchise operators are pouring significant dollars and resources into providing online marketing support to their franchisees, but they’re not able to coordinate a comprehensive approach on their own.
Each franchise market is unique, offering and emphasizing a different set of service or product offerings than others based on the tastes, needs and competitive influences of their individual market. This can make it seem almost impossible for the franchise owner to craft a coordinated, brand-consistent, yet locally-relevant online strategy for each franchise location. A problem only exacerbated in a market where the technology, including changes in the search algorithms employed by Google, Bing and Yahoo, the paid-advertising bidding ranking systems of a vast network of paid advertising networks, and the advance of mobile devices and map-relevance, advances so rapidly that just keeping up at a corporate level is almost impossible.
synthesis marketing consulting advises its clients to:
Rethink the ‘website’ purpose: Some websites serve as ‘brochures’, educating the customer on the unique benefits of the franchise product/service. These sites are critical, but the local site for each franchise location needs a different emphasis: ACTION. Local sites should be brand consistent, follow a structured domain-name policy, and provide pages heavily focused on converting customers into callers, emailers, and prospects.
Localize your search terms: Do you call it ‘pop’ or ‘soda’? Search terms can vary by location, and include descriptions for areas, neighborhoods, or communities that don’t reconcile to the place names on a map. Your search term keywords need to be customized for each location, and for each organic or paid search provider.
Avoid family fights: Without a coordinated approach derived from the franchise operator, the more eager franchisees will take it upon themselves to run paid advertising campaigns on the web. However, without the expertise and coordination of a centralized plan, they can end up raising the cost for everyone by competing on search terms, and clouding and confusing the franchise brand. Get together and coordinate, possibly aggregating your efforts regionally when you have a number of franchises saturated in a single market.
With the leadership of the franchise operator, and the cooperation of the franchisees, the network can create an online presence that rewards every participant, reflects the preferences of each local market, and maintains a constant and consistent brand for the franchise. With that, the promise of the franchise is restored in the digital era.
IN DEFENSE OF CREATIVITY
The discipline of marketing has changed dramatically over the course of the last few decades. With the rise of powerful computing, data aggregation, reporting and visualization tools, and finally AI-driven action, we’ve reached a point where the SCIENCE of marketing has overtaken the ART of marketing. Virtually every conversation I can recall over the last few years with CEO’s, investors, and even fresh-from-college marketing interns begins and ends with a focus on metrics-driven marketing. For good reason, we have access to data algorythms that can not only ‘accurately’ measure the performance of marketing campaigns, but in some cases predict the outcome of future efforts - when variables hold steady.
That caveat is important, however: “when variables hold steady”. Turns out most marketers are not the best scientists, and don’t apply a rigirous scientific method to their performance metrics. A/B testing of website content often fails to control for the traffic source, content of the source ad/link, time of day, external news/influences in sentiment, geography, platform, audience demographic and more. Accounting for and controlling all variables is what makes an experiment sound, and while it’s virtually impossible to control for all variables (especially without the assistance of big data computing), many marketers often control for only one: results. They are pressured by the business and the current scientific focus of marketing to justify all decisions with metrics - hard numbers that show that A outperforms B and therefore we are optimized to perform best.
While I could go on for days about all of the faults in the ‘scientific method’ applied by 99% of the marketing programs out there, and I’m not denying that metrics matter and should be used to govern decisions, there’s a key point that gets lost in all of this focus on (often faulty) science.
In order to perform an A/B test, you must first have an A, and a B.
If it’s ad copy, someone first has to write A, and write B, and then test the comparative performance of each.
With the focus of marketing shifting to scientific performance, many businesses have forgotten to acquire talent that can create A, B, and subsequently C, D, E etc. Meanwhile, as the tools to automate measurement and testing improve, the creative talent is actually more important, because no computer can yet simulate the spontaneous synthesis of one random concept to another concept to CREATE something new. There are no truly NEW ideas, just new combinations, and right now humans are infinitely better at fusing disparate concepts into new things. A book from over a decade ago can make this argument far better than I can; Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” from 2006 makes the case for why creative thinking is more valuable than analytical thinking as we automate more and more via technology.
“Today, the defining skills of the previous era - the “left brain” capabilities that powered the Information Age - are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous - the “right brain” qualities of inventiveness, empaythy, joyfulness, and meaning - increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders.
— Daniel Pink - A Whole New Mind
Computers can perform quantitative analysis and tell us whether A or B is more effective far better than any human, but right now only a human can conjure A and B from the synthesis of the random experiences of business, music, art, sports, social interaction and more.
As a business owner, demand the SCIENCE to measure, but value the ART to create the results.
TINY POINTS OF FRICTION
I went into the drug store to get some basics: toothpaste, deoderant, razor blades etc. It wasn’t an emergency, just stocking up on the essentials, and I expected to be in and out in an instant. When I got to the razors, I found that they were locked and required an employee to dispense. And now, I get my razors from Dollar Shave Club online...
The small point of friction of having to hail down an employee, wait for them to come over, and perform a sort of “high-security prisoner exchange” after they’ve confirmed that I don’t look like a thief, was enough to make me forget buying blades at retail - not just that day, forever. It wasn’t the quality of the blades, nor the cost, nor the brand, nor the very pleasant rest of the shopping experience; it was that one (relatively small) point of friction that robbed both Gillette and CVS of revenue. The same thing is probably happening on your website right now.
Marketers love e-commerce for its linear flow: lead channels funnel customers to a site and they are driven to transaction. The experts of e-commerce analyze the funnel, A/B test every detail, and optimize the flow to reduce customer friction. Perhaps no one has ever done this better than Amazon with it’s one-click to buy button. Smaller businesses, start-ups, and those that aren’t high-transaction volume businesses have a harder time analyzing their web funnel and diagnosing the small points of friction. Their are good analytics tools to help, but even those can be pricey or difficult for a small business owner to use. In some cases, the best thing you can do is try it yourself.
When I engage with a client, I start by approaching their site as a prospective customer. Being pre-disposed to focus on messaging, I pay specific attention to how long it takes me to ‘get’ what they do and why they are different. If within 30 seconds of landing on the site I don’t have a clear sense of the problem they solve and their unique position to solve it, I’m both frustrated and pretty sure they’re losing customers. If they offer an e-commerce solution, I’ll follow that path and evaluate the little things (button placement, clarity of next steps, context, colors, how the style of the site informs my judgement of the brand, etc.) looking for the tiny points of friction that could stop the sale.
If you don’t have the tools, staff or marketing know how to operate a scientific conversion rate optimization process, be sure to at least take the time to put yourself in the customer’s shoes on occasion, or have a friend/neighbor test the path to and through your website. Sometimes we rush to blame the product, pricing, quality of leads, or other factors for the loss of customers, when it’s as simple as putting your blades under lock and key.
THE POWER OF A COHESIVE MESSAGE
THE POWER OF A COHESIVE MESSAGE
A.K.A.: “IN DEFENSE OF POLITICAL BULLS$#T”
There’s no place like home. That’s especially true when it comes to the ‘home’ of your message to the world. Having a cohesive and logical flow from what you do to the why, how, who and where of your mission is critical for both you and your audience to be able to make sense of all the facts about your business. It’s not enough to have a cute tagline, or even an obvious value to your potential market, you have to make sense of why the world should believe you when you state your purpose.
Whenever approaching how to properly position a brand, product or company, I construct a mind map, placing the core purpose of the business in the center and methodically building out a hierarchical structure in support of that value proposition. Above the core purpose is the NEED - the market factors, weaknesses in older solutions, challenges and problems encountered by the potential audience and more that create the need for someone to provide the expressed core value of the company. Below is the PROOF that the company in question is capable of fulfilling their promised value.
Typically, that PROOF tier includes headlines for the product(s), services, people, history, technology, competition, and more. Each of those spawns a tier below; products spawning FAB (Features, Advantages, Benefits), technology spawning clear choices in methodology, history spawning evidence of past success, etc. This allows even a tiny bit of technical minutiae to be tied to a larger tactic or feature, which in turn feeds the overall strategy or product, which in turn supports the business mission. Once the map is complete, it’s virtually impossible to discuss the business, even if responding to a detailed question about a simple user interface decision, without being able to tie the question back to the root value of the company. This serves to reinforce that EVERY decision is driven by the unwavering goal the business exists to achieve.
Sometimes it’s easiest to see this in play outside of the business world and instead in the world of politics. Politicians for high-office are often coached to cover their weaknesses and emphasize their strengths by redirecting ALL questions, difficult or easy, to their core platform and area of strength. Imagine for a moment I was running for Congress as the “Education Candidate”, leveraging my resume and voting history of support for education as the core reason to select me over my “National Defense Candidate” competitor. I’m not going to win in a discussion of foriegn policy, military strategy, or defense spending against my 20-year veteran competitor, so every mention of those issues strengthens him and weakens me...Unless, I can turn weakness into strength.
QUESTION: ”You’re competitor has said he would not negotiate with [country X] and instead bring military force to bear to settle the dispute; how would you remediate the issue?”
ANSWER: “It’s a serious issue and one I think we need to evaluate carefully. That said, I can’t justify spending $5 Billion on a military operation, especially at a time when we’re suffering at home, on actions overseas with unclear outcomes. Our schools are crumbling, and my top priority would be to apply those dollars toward educating the next generation so we can continue to prosper. What happens 8,000 miles away is irrelevant if we don’t deal with the mess in our own house.”
Agree or disagree, I have just pivoted your international policy question into a question that highlights my strengths and draws contrast against my competitor. Listen carefully to the sound bites of any candidate - or their respective cable news outlets - and you’ll see the effects of this coaching everywhere. Political spin aside, the lesson itself is valuable. Being able to pull, push or contort even the most disjointed data points into a single cohesive message makes you more memorable and more valuable to your target audience. Building a message map and training everyone in your organization to navigate it can ensure that even the most difficult questions support your core reason for being. Take the time to map out every aspect of your business and construct a model that makes sense of it all; it will literally become the backbone of your website, collateral, sales presentation, sales pitch, advertising and more. If you have any trouble, call us :-)
MARKETING YOUR VALUE
Reminded this morning by a random YouTube link of this internal explanation of Apple’s brand strategy by Steve Jobs shortly after returning to the company. Perfectly captures the importance of having a core set of values, and a compelling story for why you exist as the company. Those values, and the reason for your existence they suggest, form the backbone of ALL of your marketing and sales messaging. This is what we strive to achieve for our clients; to capture the essence of their value to the world and express it in artifacts that spread the word. But I’ll let Steve explain…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TNYbcqyyj68&feature=emb_logo
Apple doesn’t make a point to specifically articulate their brand value, it’s implied in the “THINK DIFFERENT” campaign and every design choice in their products. Why does Apple exist? What’s their core value to the world? Is it to make really cool technology? To help people communicate? What one phrase or idea captures the essence of Apple’s purpose?
To me, the answer is that Apple exists to “simplify technology in order to enrich people’s lives”. Apple products and services are often - or used to be, when they were more reliable! ;-) - described as “it just works”. You don’t have to worry about how, you don’t have to learn complex commands; the hardware, software and services seem to predict your needs and make things work in a way that makes sense, even though you don’t have any idea of the complicated computing taking place underneath. In the ‘THINK DIFFERENT” campaign, Apple is implying that their core values could have, would have, and do, inspire the most creative and influential people in the world to CHANGE things.
That core value works because it isn’t tied to the iPhone, Mac, iTunes, or iCloud. It isn’t a product, or even a category, it’s an IDEA. And that idea gives Apple the freedom to step into new markets any time they think they can simplify technology to enrich people’s lives. Whether that be with a tablet that artists can draw upon, or a TV service that makes it easy to find compelling entertainment, or syncing files in the cloud so you always have access to the information you need. Apple is free to build anything in the tech space that might require a dose of simplicity and design in order to free people to live and work in a better way. Having a core value that open-ended ensures that Apple doesn’t live and die with the latest technology trends.
The product(s) you make today might be irrelevant in a few years, is your purpose greater than making the best widget?