The ultimate speed limit in the universe is the speed of light, measured at approximately 299,792 kilometers per second, just a little bit slower than the number of thoughts you are having at 3am everyday. Now what does this have to do with the title of the blog?
Here we go, gyaan time: “Marketing is convincing you to circumnavigate these thoughts just enough to make a purchase decision erratically!” Now mind you, these might or might not yield value for the user, but that’s what good marketing does, it will convince you that YOU NEED THIS PRODUCT/SERVICE like your life depended on it.
Today I would try to summarize my 7 years of marketing knowledge down to three key pillars that would help you sell anything to anyone!(PS: no promises!)
Assuming we know everything about the product/service we need to market, we need to ask ourselves just 3 questions and they are:
Out of a 100 people, who is uniquely likely to hear what I have to offer?
This is called Intent Matching in Marketing and is how we find the traits and characteristics that separate our ideal user from a crowd. A few questions to help here are: What is their age, gender, occupation, marital status, location, income bracket, hobbies, habits, interests, personality etc..
These help uniquely identify an individual from a crowd and come from both observations and inferences of people in your target market. Once you have identified these, we can call these our buyer personas and refining them would get us our TRUE ideal customer persona. Hopefully this is what an MRI from the metaverse would look like.
Unless you are a Jiosaavn, Gaana, Youtube music, Apple Music connoisseur, you must’ve heard about Spotify, right? (you’ve probably heard it regardless). Anyways, spotify utilizes AI algorithms to analyze users’ listening habits, creating personalized playlists like “Discover Weekly.”
By matching user intent for new and relevant music, Spotify keeps users engaged on its platform for longer and incites app reopen behavior. The success of this feature lies in its ability to predict and meet individual musical preferences, demonstrating effective intent matching through personalization at scale.
Companies like Amazon use purchasing behaviors to drive recommendations that match user intent. Their “Customers who bought this item also bought…” feature is a classic example of leveraging behavioral data for bucketing users via intent matching.
Assuming the listener has an interest, how can we convince them to take an action towards purchasing our product/service?
Communication is the biggest differentiator in a good marketing campaign. This is where you max your creative juices out! Creative messages strike out, convince and help recall a brand all at the same time. I often refer to Marketing Examples for inspiration and there are many such websites that act as hall of fame for excellent ad copies. In conclusion, something that would work always is:
- Show in-depth niche understanding of the problems faced by your customer
- Show how your product/service targets just that sweet spot.
- You need something that personally resonates with the user while appealing to the masses. This is easier said than done and varies greatly depending on the context of the product/service. Believe in social proof and trust signals, forget most of the frameworks and put yourself in the shoes, socks and pants of the customers.
- Understanding basic biology and consumer psychology helps a lot. Of course, not the types of flora and fauna but about the theories of neurological marketing. You can start your foundation from a book called “Cashvertising by D.E. Whitman”. Would’ve put an affiliate link to his book if I had one.
- Identify your USP and learn from your competitors’ mistakes
- Under-promise and over-deliver for retaining such customers.
Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign is a prime example of emotional branding. By focusing on inspirational stories and overcoming obstacles, Nike communicates a powerful message that resonates deeply with its audience, transcending the mere promotion of athletic apparel.
Now you know how to find 1 in a crowd, focus on how to find thousands in bigger crowds?
Simple. DISTRIBUTE AND SCALE.
Wait, maybe not that simple?
If Puneet eats 70 donuts a day, how many donuts will he eat in a month?
Probably he will succumb to diabetes before he finishes a month of that diet.
In short, things often never scale linearly and neither should you expect them to. Challenges will present themselves when you ask for personalisations at scale. However, finding new channels and mediums and also experimenting on communications is key to sustainable marketing campaigns.
You might know that Netflix began as a DVD rental service but anticipated the shift toward digital streaming. They leveraged their knowledge of viewing habits to transition into an online streaming platform. Further expanding, they began producing original content tailored to audience preferences identified through their data analysis. This move into content creation and streaming attracted a vast number of new customers globally. This is how analysis of meaningful data helps you find new avenues and channels to scale parabolically or as the nerds say, ‘draw a hockey stick growth curve’.
So in order to scale efficiently and sustainably, do these:
- Fix leaky buckets in your customer journey, there is no use of getting 10000 new users if 1000 existing customers leave every day.
- Find new channels with similar audience intent and do long-term trials on new channels and mediums to decipher intent match and communication.
- Stand on the shoulders of giants with mutually beneficial partnerships with big players in your industry.
- Experiment like a witch on steroids to constantly monitor channel quality and revenue metrics.
Maybe after doing all of this you might understand that customers only care about one thing, and that is, “their perception of the value of the goods/services sold”. Do everything in your capacity to make it a brag worthy decision of purchase and you’d never have to do a marketing campaign. Note, the value you provide and the value they perceive might be very different from each other. Use behavioral cues to understand this effectively!
Till next time,
Yours Truly,
Witch on Steroids
