Boredom in marketing …. cause for distraction – Part 3

Distractions, ideal customer, Marketing, messaging, segmentation, single target market

People have such a low attention span these days, that, anything that even remotely screams marketing, gets thrown into the delete mode even without a second thought. With electronic messaging this is even more convenient.

So while electronic messaging via email or via social media can get you very targeted audience, sometimes almost free, they also have the highest “ignore” rates.

While one of the reasons for the “ignore” is the massive number of unnecessary emails or messages people get, the other is because the messages don’t speak to the prospect in what’s important to him. So while they are trying to scan your subject line / headline , and if your message is boring, an alert pops up on their cell phone and they get drawn into it and you have lost that small window of opportunity.

Understanding what is going on in the mind of the prospect is critical – what conversations she could be having, are critical to ensuring that you are not boring. You can do this kind of specific messaging only if you have segmented the market so well, that the conversations start to become evident.

In any given market segment there will always be the early adopters, the laggards, the fence sitters etc. What is the use case that you are targeting will decide within the segment what is your Single Target Market to start your messaging with. If you are targeting the replacement market then you go with a different kind of messaging, while if you are targeting the early adopters you need to be looking at how your message can play to their vanity of being early adopters.

Creating messaging is a very time consuming job and requires a lot of subtle changes in the language. Whenever I have tried to get something out in a hurry, because the team was in a hurry, those campaigns have bombed for us. And the time which I saved at the beginning has actually resulted in a much larger waste. Boring messages, motherhood statements, just get people to select delete because of the plethora of other distractions which exist.

Till next time then. Don’t let your marketing get boring.

Carpe Diem!!!

Boredom in marketing….cause for distraction – Part 2

B2B, Marketing, messaging, Triggers

In the first part we spoke about how marketing is all about applied psychology. So to ensure that the prospects read and respond to your message they have to get curious about what you send to them.

When you are marketing to consumers, you can have different nuances like comedy, location and other things to make the prospect curious about your offerings. However when you are marketing to B2B customers the messaging has to be a little more formal. The remaining part of the post is focused on B2B messaging and how to make it more interesting for the recipient so that they don’t get bored and move to the next item.

One way, to ensure you are not boring, that I have written about multiple times earlier, is using triggers. These could be related to the industry in general, the company in particular or the person specifically. The more specific the trigger, more the chance of getting a person interested.

In B2B messaging, the concept of triggers, works best when you’re doing one – on – one messaging. A person could have joined new, a person could have got promoted, a person could have moved to a new department within the company. The CEO of the company could have set new priorities. Or the price of oil going up could impact the company positively or negatively. You will need to have people dedicated to working on tracking these triggers for your list of prospects.

You then need to mold your message about your offerings and make it relevant with the triggers. If you’re using FedEx or a similar service you could even deliver an oversized package to draw the attention of your prospect even further. On the other hand if you’re going to use email then the message has to be short and should invoke curiosity.

We will discuss in more detail next time.

Till then….

Carpe Diem!!!

Boredom in marketing….cause for distraction

Distractions, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging

One of the main causes when a person gets distracted is because of boredom. The other three being hedonic adaption, negativity bias and rumination. As per Nir Eyal in his book Indistractable, the way to avoid boredom is to get curious. Even very mundane tasks as per him can be made interesting if we are curious about something. Curiosity can kill boredom and can stop you from getting distracted

Marketing is applied psychology. What is valid for the individual in his daily routine is also valid for the person who gets your marketing message.

If your message is boring, the prospect will get distracted from your message and move to something else. So you need to make the prospect get curious about your offerings. That’s the only way she will be interested in interacting with you further.

When do people become curious. In my opinion when the message has something directly to do with THEM. Which means the message should look like it’s ONLY TO them and ABOUT them. If the message anywhere screams marketing, it will automatically get banished.

So the messaging has to look one – on – one (to them) and should target the conversation that could be going on in the mind of a prospect (about them). It cannot be a sermon. It has to be specific because people now have a very short attention span.

Which brings us to the most difficult part. Understanding the conversation in the mind of the prospect, building multiple communication pieces which invoke curiosity in her mind.

And you then need to have staying power to ensure, because people respond when they want to respond. If you don’t have the marketing stamina to last long enough then you won’t be able to win.

Till next time then….we will continue on this

Carpe Diem!!!

Dissatisfaction is progress in the market

Lateral Marketing, Marketing, messaging, Product Management, segmentation

Do lions get dissatisfied or for that matter zebras or giraffes. My guess is “No”. Lions and zebras and all the other animals have more or less remained as they were more than a 100000 years back. The lion in the image above still hunts its prey when it feels hungry and then just goes and rests with its family exactly what its ancestors did a hundred thousand years back.

Humans have evolved over that same time. One of the reasons is the fact that we had real estate in our head, due to which our brains could grow and evolve and are still evolving. In one of my earlier posts I wrote about how scarcity is the mother of all development. If we don’t have food, we try to find ways to grow food, we create GM seeds so that pests and weather don’t impact them. If we don’t have water we seed clouds or desalinate water from the sea.

I will qualify that while scarcity causes us to think of solutions, its the dissatisfaction with the scarcity which is the mother of all progress. If we are not dissatisfied with the fact that we are short of something and we need to find ways to get out of the situation, we would never move from being cavemen to what we are today. Not being able to find food would have made us look for ways to build weapons that could be used to kill wild animals and help us not get killed.

But its this same dissatisfaction which cause us to feel bad, feel low etc. Its what gets us emotional about issues. And the negativity with the issues causes us to also do negative things like arson, robbery etc. So its a double edged sword.

Marketing and product management is all about finding the dissatisfaction in the market and providing a solution. If you can clearly identify different areas of dissatisfaction, you can segment the market in different ways. Quite a lot of times the dissatisfaction is latent…..nobody knew they wanted a car versus a horse carriage.

But yes people were fed up of dirty taxis, high fares & tantrums and someone thought of ride sharing without owning any taxis.

However more often then not you don’t create a product or service from scratch. You have to mould what you have, by adding features or deleting some, to meet a specific need of a specific segment of the market and then carry your messaging in a way that the market gets it. I would highly recommend you to read Lateral Marketing by Philip Kotler to learn the frameworks of how you can create new segments/uses by making subtle changes in your products.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!