Business | The MarketFarm

Selling what your customers want v. what they need

Content marketing guy Newt Barrett turns around conventional wisdom, suggesting that instead of working to develop a unique selling proposition, you develop a Unique Buying Proposition. This is more than a semantic turn. The UBP forces you to think like your customers. It changes the question from “Why should they buy from me?” to “Why do they WANT to buy from me?”

You can read Newt’s complete case here.

Would you do a better job buying this...

In the meantime, I’ll add this thought on selling: People will spend more to buy something they want than something they need. The corollary is that they’ll do whatever they can to avoid buying what they need, whereas they enjoy buying things they want.

So even if you’re offering business-to-business products or services, there is a benefit to communicating in a way that helps people WANT to buy what you’re selling.

... or this?

If they feel the product has value-added benefits, some kind of cache, or is exciting and transformative, they’ll buy more readily (and tend to be more pleased) than if they buy something because it has the lowest price or simply fills an urgent need.

That’s the beauty of Newt’s concept of the UBP: It helps your prospects to see your product as something they WANT to buy.

Most small biz doesn’t qualify leads or track marketing ROI. Surprised?

In B2BOnline, Christopher Hosford reports on a study by the Sales Lead Management Association that indicates “nearly 63% of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs.” And 56% say they don’t qualify their leads before sending them to sales. SLMA observed the prevailing attitude among marketers that sales should qualify their own leads.

The survey was conducted online, B2B writes, and of the 140 respondents, all had fewer than 250 employees and three-quarters had fewer than 25. The conclusion of the study: these companies are allowing sales and marketing to operate independently of each other without aligning their objectives.

I’ve observed it myself at one industrial business after another over the past decade, when interviewing marketing teams as part of the media sales process. The vast majority will say that leads remain their primary metric for measuring the effectiveness of their work.

And yet, they will also admit to doing nothing with the leads because:

They aren’t very good;
Their distributors don’t follow up on them anyway;
There is no mechanism in place to qualify leads for sales.

What a cynical way to do a job: on one day demand that your media partners provide more leads to improve your ROI, and on the next day hide that “ROI” into the bottom drawer, pulling it out only when your boss comes around and asks, “What exactly do you do around here?”

It was just such a prospect who once told me, “I don’t think our marketing efforts are half bad.” Now armed with an actual benchmark, I could now reply to him, “Actually, they’re 63% bad.”

If you can’t bring journalists to the computer, then bring geeks to journalism

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism is turning out its first group of graduates in a master’s program that teaches computer geeks to be journalists, according to Time magazine. The idea is to combine advanced programming for computer applications and other interactive tools with reporting and journalism — making data and databases an integral part of the news.

Here’s a paragraph from Medill’s master’s degree course catalog:

The Digital Innovation Project (JOUR 435-0, 435-1)
This project challenges students to answer a specific editorial business challenge by inventing interactive solutions, often with a focus on innovative content delivery. Editorial challenges sometimes are posed by partner media organizations, sometimes by faculty or students. Students in this project have explored new ways of designing content for handheld devices, and new ways of creating interactive community, and in one case wrote a new software program to help a news operation engage more closely with its community.

In other words, if the medium is the message, this is huge. It has potential to change the very nature of how journalists work and what they do. Especially since Medill isn’t alone; among other schools starting to turn out journalist programmers are University of Missoure, Georgia Tech and University of California at Berkeley, according to Time.

Imagine an investigative article on government judicial conflict-of-interest, for example, that includes an application allowing readers to conduct their own searches by judge, defendant and plaintiff.

That’s admittedly a utopian view of journalism creating ultimate and constructive transparency — something it’s always strived to do and has rarely, if ever, achieved.

Or, I suppose, it could go the other direction: creating a bunch of people writing about the programming nuances of WordPress v. Blogspot. Which would you rather see?

A must-read for all you content types (that’s ‘editorial’) in the old paradigm

Here are 7 non-nonsense rules for any editorial types who plan to survive the 2009 Media Meltdown and transform themselves into the content creators of the future. For the detail, read the original blog on Recessionwire, written by Laura Rich, a journalist and regular contributor there.

Readers are your competitors — and your friends.
Identify your expertise.
Build your brand.
Be transparent.
Crowdsource (actively seek participation in the development of your story).
Use self service tools.
Interact with your readers.

You’ll find the full explanation behind each at the original blog.

Go forth, do good and do well.

On the art of ‘followership’

In his dependably brief and insightful blog, marketing guru Seth Godin writes about this video of a spontaneously developing community at a dance festival: “My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement. Initiators are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Guy #3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Guy #49 is irrelevant. No bravery points for being part of the mob.
“We need more guy #3s.”

There are lots of lessons you can take away from this. The one it most illustrates for me has to do with starting a business or launching a new product. More than once I’ve found myself dealing with a leading-edge product that I thought was brilliant. Too often, the response from the target market was, “Interesting. We’ll wait and see.”

The first copycat to come out with a similar product validates it, and makes it easier to sell. The next competitor helps flip the switch among customers from “wait and see” to “hurry up and buy.”

One’s an innovator; two’s competition; three’s a movement.

American Pie send-up on media

Anyone living through the media meltdown will enjoy this clever 9-minute rewrite of the old Don McLean anthem.

More than ever, the medium is the message

At the time, he was talking about the fast advent of TV. But if you want to see the truth of his statement in action, you’re already in the right place: online.

A message in Twitter is 140 characters long.
A message on 12seconds.tv is, well, 12 seconds long.
You get about 400 characters to express your thoughts on Facebook.
LinkedIn is businesslike; you can’t get as lost as you can on Facebook, and the variety of activities in more limited.
Squidoo lets you type in original content, but it’s really about packaging other content — yours or somebody else’s — under a single thematic umbrella.
A blog is unlimited, but is accepted as “good” only if it gets updated frequently.

There are at least dozens more kinds of electronic media where you can place your messages. I know people who market themselves online using all of the above media and more. But if you want to get people to pay attention to what you’re writing, you can’t just cut and paste your blog post onto Facebook and Twitter and Squidoo, etc.

In some cases, there are limitations such Twitter’s infamous 140-character limit. In all, there is the simple and unarguable feedback from the market. If you do it right, people will pay attention. If you do it wrong, they won’t.

Doing it right means integrating strengths, weaknesses and peculiarities of the medium into whatever it is that you’re writing, videotaping, podcasting, etc. If you want to give a lecture, don’t bother putting it on YouTube unless you have strong visuals to go with it. And don’t simply post the transcript of your lecture as a blog if you want anyone to say anything nice about it.

Today, as newspapers face their toughest economic environment ever, they’re trying to figure out how to get people to pay for content online. When I ask people about this, the usual response is that they aren’t sure they’d find an electronic newspaper to be worth reading, let alone paying for.

But they’re imposing their view of newspapers as a print medium on the coming reality of newspapers online.

To be sure, some publishers will make a mess of it. They’ll try to do exactly what they’re doing now — but without the paper costs. And they’ll fail.

Others will figure it out. The paper of the future may provide headlines to your cellphone in the morning, with updates all day. On a Smartphone, the headlines may link to the full story. You may have the choice whether you want to get one section (world news, for instance) in-depth, and another (perhaps sports) on only a cursory basis. The website might offer configuration and search tools, letting you scan for all articles containing a specific keyword, or filter out stories from the opposite side of town. It could give you Tweets as news breaks, video clips of big events, or full context about ongoing, longterm stories. It may led you contribute news in the form of short video and photos. You might be able to read it on a Kindle, on screen or hear it through your ipod. And somewhere in there, they’ll figure out how to not only collect a critical mass of paid subscribers, they’ll also figure out how to serve advertisers.

In other words, newspapers will survive. But they won’t look like they do today, and they won’t DO what they do today either, because they’ll come to us not just through the same old medium, but through a Dagwood sandwich of media.

So McLuhan’s old saw really is more important than ever. When he wrote it, he was dealing with print, TV and radio. Today, because the medium is the message, it means the message changes many times a day depending on where you happen to be when you choose to accept it.

10 YOUNG entrepreneurs to watch

Warning: If you have more than 20 years already invested in your career, this is going to make you very tired and at least a little bit scared. Here, from ContentNext.com are 10 y oung entrepreneurs to watch. By young, they mean really young — no older than their 20s.

What’s most instructive and startling is the transformational nature of what these kid are doing. Their businesses are, largely, based on ideas that couldn’t even have existed 5 or 10 years ago.

If you have any questions about the power of the Internet to foster change; or if you have any doubt that the next generation does things very differently than you’re used to, then you ought to spend 10 minutes scanning this article. Then resist the temptation to take a nap.

The difference between liberals and conservatives is … genetic?

Nicholas Kristoff writes in the New York Times that your political leaning isn’t your fault.

Liberals and conservatives not only think differently, he writes, they feel differently. Which means that when a person accuses you of a horrible misunderstanding about the way the world works, an argument doesn’t have to ensue.

First, you should know that this poor confrontational soul has been trained from the day he or she was born — and maybe even programmed in the womb — to disagree with you on pretty much anything that matters.

This is important to a whole bunch of folks, like those at Civilpolitics.org who seem to think that we ought to be able to discuss our differences without calling each other idiots and nitwits.

That’s just crazy talk.

We should care precisely because polite dialogue is a waste of time that we don’t have. Anyone who uses this knowledge to increase the amount of talk should be sent to Guantanamo. The rest of us will use this insight can be used to get right to the heart of the matter ASAP. We can finally settle the critical issues of our time: abortion, gay marriage, access to health care and whether the Constitution is a living, breathing document.

What we need to do is conduct more research into the workings of the political mind. This could get costly, so the government might need to subsidize it. But it would be one area of study that we can all agree is worth the price. Am I not right?

Soon we will know with certainty which end of the political spectrum is not a choice, but rather an unfortunate disability. Once we know that, it’s an easy step to an infrastructure of subsidized treatment centers offering therapy, behavior modification, enhanced cognition techniques and, eventually, carefully monitored release of individuals back into society.

Which side would get this assistance and care? Liberals or conservatives?

It’s obvious already. And if you have to ask, fill out the form below; your plastic bracelet will arrive in the mail in a few days.