3 Marketing Mistakes You’re Probably Making
First of all, a tiny rant: Marketing is, fundamentally, telling people that you can make their lives better because you have a solution to their problem.
There is lots of expensive, complicated, and sometimes fluffy stuff that can come into play later on, but I cringe when I hear entrepreneurs or product managers try to wash their hands of marketing altogether. You can’t do it. If you cannot communicate effectively why your product will help me, you don’t have a product.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s proceed. You are probably making these mistakes. I feel pretty confident in saying this, because I am making these mistakes even though I write about this stuff all the frickin’ time. So this is a reminder to me and a kick in the pants to you to go do what you know you should be doing.
Not explaining how you’re different from your competitor / the leader in your space
Do you know who you should be differentiating yourself from? If you’re in a resegmented or new market, you may think you have no competition. Wrong. There is some alternative – if customers were not using your product, what would they be using? If you don’t know, do some customer interviews. (The answer may be a product that you think is totally different, or it may be a manual/offline solution.)
Are you effectively explaining how you’re different? Talk to 3 power-user and 3 semi-novice customers and ask them “how would you explain to a friend how our product is different from [competitor]?” Are their responses factually accurate? Are their responses similar? If so, you’re doing a great job. If your power users can explain the difference but your novice customers can’t, you need to find the explanations that work.
How I’m working on this right now: a couple of face-to-face customer interviews where I try to explain the difference between us and the competitor (over coffee, people are much more forgiving of you rambling). I watch for the phrases where I see a light go off in their eyes, or where they are prompted to interject with a question, and I write those down. After three face-to-face interviews, I have a list of concepts that I think are worth pursuing.
My next step will be to cull those into 2 or 3 sets of bullet points, and build a few quick-and-dirty landing pages. I’ll show those to people and ask them if they understand how we’re different from our competitor. Note that I haven’t mentioned A/B testing – in this case, I prefer to start with qualitative feedback, because the goal I’m after is understanding, not a numerical conversion.
Not using your customers’ own words to describe your benefits
Where are customers getting value from your product? It may not be where you expect. Ask the people who are regular customers, paying customers, why they like your product. The way they describe your benefits is the language that will resonate with other people.
When I was at Yodlee, we were pretty sure that the benefits of our personal financial management product were: being able to see all of your financial information in one place, being able to see where your money was going, being able to see if you were saving more than you were spending. When we asked customers what they valued most, one answer rose to the top: “I feel like I have a sense of control over my money.”
We never would’ve come up with that – and personally, I thought it sounded too marketing-speak/new Age-y – but when we put that messaging on our splash pages, more visitors were interested enough to continue past the homepage, and a higher percentage converted despite a fairly long registration process.
How I’m working on this right now: Currently, doing some interviews with active customers; will be launching a mini-survey soon that only appears for logged-in, returning users, to ask them how they’d describe the value they’re getting from us.
Not asking customers to tell others about your product
There are two Mac apps that I paid for, use every day, and love. (Curio, for sketching and brainstorming; and PTH Pasteboard, for remembering the last 100 things you ‘copied’) Whenever the subject arises, I’ll eagerly recommend them – but people don’t ask that often.
These companies are missing out – because if they just asked, I would happily tweet about them, write a review, refer a friend. But like most companies, they don’t ask.
Even if you think word-of-mouth recommendations aren’t going to bring in a huge number of new customers, there are two reasons why you should encourage happy customers to spread the word. First, it brings good search engine juju – when people are searching for your company, don’t you want them to see happy tweets and reviews along with your corporate info? Second, it reinforces customers’ happiness – once you recommend something, you actually feel more positively about it (thanks to a neat psychological effect called post-decision dissonance).
Something as simple as a link that says “Are you happy with [product]? Tell your network!” that pre-fills a Twitter post would be easy to implement for just about any site.
Who has done this brilliantly: Dropbox. Good article by @pricing on their referral and pricing process: http://www.pricingwire.com/home/2009/5/7/referral-and-pricing-lessons-from-dropbox-beta.html
How I’m working on this right now: Currently building a “refer a friend” workflow similar to Dropbox for our new KISSinsights product. I’m also collecting customers’ descriptions of why they like the product and planning to whittle those down to “easily-retweetable” sound bites.
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