A Few Marketing Tips

I’ve been helping people with marketing a lot lately, and a few things keep coming up. So, if you’re stuck writing copy for an ad or your landing page or even an onboarding sequence, here you are three helpful tips, and four helpful frameworks:

The Tips

1. You Need Conflict to Hammer Home Your “Swap” The key to any interesting story is conflict, and it’s the best tool to show the difference between your customer’s previous life and the new one you’re creating for them (the swap). Don’t shy away from it. If you’re making delicious, fresh then freeze dried coffee pods with the goal of replacing someone’s crappy morning Keurig, don’t say you have “delicious, fresh, freeze dried coffee.” Create conflict with their existing process. “You know your Keurig coffee is stale and gross… but it’s fast. Our coffee is fresh and delicious … and still fast.”

2. Be More Specific. Vague is boring and specific is interesting, because it’s impossible to relate to vague and easy to relate to specific. “Lots of people love soup” is boring and un-relatable, “my neighbor loves soup so much he eats it four times a day” is interesting and lets you put yourself in that neighbor’s shoes. To improve conversion on anything, make the story more specific so that your customer can relate to it.

3. Describe Emotions and Feelings. Marketing is about trust, and trust is about a shared secret. If there’s something you know about your customer that competitors miss, point it out. This often relates to emotions and feelings. Humans are bad at these, so here’s a handy list. How, exactly, does your customer feel when the problem occurs? If you can describe how they feel better than competitors, they’ll trust that you’ll be able to solve for that feeling better than competitors.

The Frameworks

1. Use Bus Route Messaging. All good products are like a bus route. They pick their customer up somewhere specific and drop them off somewhere else specific. Describe exactly where you pick them up and where you drop them off to help them understand your value.

2. Describe Their Credentials: A big part of picking a customer is deciding the work they’ve already done before you start helping. If you’re helping anyone do better on the SATs, you won’t get customers. If you’re helping people who “already got a 700 but want to shoot for an 800,” the credentials help the customer self-select and trust that you understand that part of the journey.

3. Use STTC (So That They Can) Messaging: The magic marketing sentence. We help you X, so that you can Y. The ultimate cheat code. The more specific you are on X and Y, the better.

4. Use “We’ll Take This Off Your Plate” Messaging: Entrepreneurs love talking about the incredible possibilities their product provides, but way more compelling (and easier to digest) is the pain you’ll remove. “Right now, you do X, Y, and Z, and that takes you 2 hours a day. From now on, we’ll do that for you” is more compelling than “we’ll help you get 200 new customers” any day.

As always, if it feels a bit uncomfortable you're on the right path.