Lego’s ad was a great example of a good branding advertisement. You’ll see why in the video below.

However, they also made a common mistake that’s especially common among newer advertisers (but clearly even large companies make that mistake).

Learn more about what makes a marketing message effective in this webinar.

And here’s the best branding advertisement of 2020 by Lego.

The post The best branding advertisement of 2020 first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

The post The best branding advertisement of 2020 appeared first on Peter Sandeen.

If your usual target customers aren’t buying your usual products or services, you have to try something else. Or you can wait for the slow death of your business.

Assuming you aren’t ready to give up, you have two options: reposition your offers or create new offers.

Both have their own challenges. It can seem hard to decide which is the better option for you. But you must choose and take action.

Here’s how you make an informed decision.

For the first time, I’ve also published this article in Finnish (with a few notes specific to Finland).

Should you reposition your offers or create new offers?

Start by answering this question:

Do at least some people have acute frustrating problems/pains your normal offers (products and services) solve?

If yes, you should at least look into repositioning your offers, changing your messaging, trying different target customers, and other smaller changes.

If not, don’t “just wait out the crisis.” That’s not an effective way to use your time.

Instead of waiting and hoping your business survives, you have two options:

Create new offers and new sales.

Or prepare something that will more than make up for the lost time once things normalize. I won’t dig deeper into that here, but it can be a good option if you’re on stable financial footing and have a great opportunity to go after. For example, many businesses wait for the “right time” to build a scalable marketing and sales system. Now might be a good time to do that, so it’s ready when things normalize.

How to reposition your offer, so you make sales (again)

Some people still have frustrating, acute problems and pains your offers would solve. If that’s not the case, skip to the next section.

The first step is to get clear on who they are and what those problems and pains are. That informs your messaging and positioning.

The next step is to modify your offer (if necessary), so it feels like a great fit for them. For example, that can mean different pricing (not necessarily cheaper), service model, or even just new bonuses.

In many ways, how you reposition your offer is like creating a new offer. You just start with an existing offer, instead of a blank sleight. So, read on…

How to create and validate a new offer

If you already have a stable business, you’re usually best off staying as close to what’s made you successful as you can.

However, that can still mean going after a new target customer with a new offer.

There’s no way to jump straight to the best idea. It’s a process with many things to consider.

Staying close to what’s made you successful means many things. Here are a few of the usual questions to consider:

• What expertise do you have?
• What makes you credible?
• What sort of products or services are you good at building or delivering?
• What type of people do you understand best?
• What kind of situations do you deliver the most value in?
• What are you good at selling?
• What type of help are you known for providing?

Looking at these is usually enough to spark ideas of what new offer you could make while staying close to what’s made you successful in the past.

Finding the best idea is about balancing those with all the other considerations. Here are a few of the common ones:

• How easily can you shift to the new idea from your usual business?
• How many resources does trying the idea require?
• How quickly can you test the idea’s validity?
• How well does the idea support your long-term plans?
• How much profit can you expect to make with the idea?
• What up-sell and cross-sell opportunities come with the idea?
• What risks are attached to pursuing the idea?

You can never be 100% certain that you chose the right idea. But when you consider all the key factors, you can make a decision that gives you the best chance of success.

Now is not the time for grand strategies

It often takes months for companies to create and implement a new idea. They create a strategy based on their strategy on how to create strategies and start implementing it based on their implementation strategy.

If your business is struggling, you don’t have time for that.

It typically takes my clients 1-2 months to get all the fundamentals thought through (target customer, offer, and messaging) and build a conversion path (every step from first contact with potential clients to a final sale). But even that might be unnecessarily long in this context.

If you’re in uncharted territory, validating your ideas quickly is usually the highest priority. Once we find the right idea to go after, we can put more effort into it.

Unless you have a clear reason to believe a specific idea is the best one, it’s better to test a few and select the best based on results. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks.

In other words, rather spend a couple extra weeks on validating your ideas than risk spending a couple months on an idea that wasn’t great after all.

Feel confident you’re making the right decision

Finding the best way forward can be an overwhelming task. There are dozens of things to consider. And when it’s your business that’s on the line, staying objective is impossible for just about everyone.

If you want to feel confident you’re making the right decision, let me help. Send me an email (contact {at} petersandeen.com) and briefly answer these questions:

• What do you sell (normally)?
• Who are your target customers?
• What are your typical rates?
• What’s your company revenue and profit (last year)?
• How is your business doing right now?
• What ideas (if any) do you have for how you could reposition your offers or what new offers you could sell?

I’ll reply and tell if it seems I could help. We can then schedule a time to talk. During that call we’ll start looking for the best steps forward. If at the end of the call you want to know how I can help further, we’ll go through that.

Getting in contact is, of course, confidential and doesn’t commit you to anything, so send that email now—it only takes a couple of minutes.

The post How to reposition your offer or create and validate a new offer quickly first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

The post How to reposition your offer or create and validate a new offer quickly appeared first on Peter Sandeen.

Although business and marketing are more complex than most typical skills (e.g., playing guitar or climbing, which I’ll use as examples), the principles are the same.

The basic steps (below) are usually enough, and the extra tips (at the end) generally break even the most persistent plateau.

So, next time you hit a plateau and start to feel like you can’t make progress, go through these steps. Odds are you’ll break the plateau sooner than you’d think.

3 steps to braking a plateau

1. Get clear about what the next level is

The first thing to do is figure out what would be the “next level.” It has to be clearly the next level—not just a slight improvement compared to where you are now.

If you’re playing guitar, the next level could be playing a song that’s clearly too hard for you now. If you’re climbing, the next level could be a route that’s a couple of grades higher than your previous best.

In business, the next level could be an order of magnitude more sales. Thinking of 10% more sales as the “next level” isn’t effective. It doesn’t require a clear jump in skills.

Breaking a plateau with gradual, almost unnoticeable improvement and optimization can work, but it’s frustratingly slow.

2. See the steps to the next level

The second step is about seeing how you get to the next level. There might be lots of routes to choose from, which is often one of the reasons for plateauing in the first place. You need to choose something and stick to it for long enough to see meaningful improvement.

If you’re playing guitar, maybe the song you want to play requires you to learn how to use really awkward barre holds, which also helps with left-hand finger agility overall. If you’re climbing, maybe you need to learn how to keep more weight on your feet, which also means improving your body positioning.

In business, you’re likely to have endless options to choose from. Getting someone who understands the big picture to point out what you should focus on can easily save you months or years of trying different things. (Yes, I can help with that.)

The key thing is to figure out what’s holding you back the most, so once you fix it, you see meaningful results. Note that it doesn’t always mean immediately seeing more sales. Not all steps forward show up as sales directly—some of the most important steps just enable good, consistent results down the line.

Maybe you need to learn to make your offers more compelling. Maybe create ads that get more people to click. Maybe learn to close in a one-to-many situation (e.g., videos, webinars, speaking on stage, sales pages).

3. Practice in a way that forces you to adapt

The third and final step is finding a way to practice those skills in a way that forces you to adapt. Many exercises only keep you at your current level.

One way to describe a plateau is “lack of adaptation.”

You can play the basic barre Fm chord thousands of times without learning to do much more. You can climb the super-easy routes endlessly and be stuck.

If you’re trying to break a plateau, doing the easy things over and over is rarely the solution. It might work eventually, but incredibly slow progress is what we’re trying to avoid here.

In business, maybe you should try to sell with a video for the first time. Or maybe you should duplicate your sales page and only change the offer’s details in the new one. Or maybe try writing a blog post with the specific goal of getting readers to subscribe to your email list.

If those sound too easy, try charging twice as much for something that takes you 90% less time to deliver. That should get you thinking.

Extra tips and notes for breaking a persistent plateau

• The “next level” you aim for should be so high that even before you reach it, you notice having broken the plateau. If the goal doesn’t force you to think of something new (not just “more of the same a little better”), think of a different goal.
• Focus on only a few things (or just one thing) at a time, so you can make progress in those faster. At least only practice one skill at a time, even if you have a few skills to train. Spreading your efforts across many things is often a major reason for the plateau.
• It’s much harder to create big jumps in some skills than others. The simpler the skill, the harder it is. Fortunately, business is anything but a simple skill, so there are always lots of ways to break a plateau if you know where to look.
• Also, don’t forget to model others (see below)…

See how others skip the learning curve

If most people make slow progress in what you’re trying to learn, but a few people skip the learning curve, figure out what they did differently.

Did they spend most of their time practicing coordination between fingers (playing guitar)? Did they focus on slabs, instead of overhanging routes (climbing)?

Did they obsess over their offer, message, and other basics more than what tactics they used (business)?

Many non-marketing-experts think that the pros get great results because of how well they use certain marketing tactics (like social media, FB ads, or funnels). But 95% of the difference is how well they did the basics first—the tactics are only the last (but the only clearly visible) step.

The post How to break a plateau and reach the next level first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

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The problem isn’t that they don’t follow all the usual best practices. The problem is exactly that they follow the usual “best practices.”

The top conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts do A/B testing very differently than what the average marketing guru talks about.

Let’s go through the difference, so you don’t waste your time and money on A/B tests that have bad odds of succeeding.

Common A/B testing “best practices”

The most common “best practice” is quite simple: “Test one thing at a time, so you know what caused the difference.”

It sounds like sound advice.

Imagine a medical test where the study groups didn’t just take different medicines, but also changed their diet, exercise routine, sleep rhythm, and social behavior. You couldn’t tell if the winning group won thanks to a better medicine or some other change.

You often (but not always) want scientists to A/B test things one change at a time.

But the goal of A/B testing marketing isn’t publishing a scientific paper. The goal is to make more sales, get more leads, etc.

The problem with “one change at a time” is that it rarely creates a statistically significant difference. Even the occasional result it creates is usually meaninglessly small.

What about all the amazing case studies?

If you’ve followed A/B tests and other CRO stuff from the sidelines, you’ve likely seen hundreds of tests where a tiny change made a huge difference.

Maybe a different button color, moved form, or slightly reworded headline increased conversion by a factor of two or eight.

Those are either flukes or the starting point (called “control”) was inexcusably bad.

Flukes are a part of all A/B testing. If you’re happy with only 95% confidence in the result (which is usually considered good enough), that means one in 20 of your tests is a fluke. I aim for 97+% confidence to cut down on flukes a bit more.

However, inexcusably bad starting situations are even far more common than flukes. The more a web development company is paid, the more likely it is that they make the site “look good.” That typically translates to ghost buttons (transparent buttons with only an outline), colors that don’t draw attention to the right things, forms that look better than they are usable or compelling, and so on.

When there are millions of A/B tests running all the time, there will be a lot of flukes and inexcusably bad control versions. A lot of those end up being published as case studies.

Almost no one publishes an article about the 578 button-color tests that didn’t create a change. But when one color change increased results by 142%, plenty of people share that story without checking the data (a lot of those results are based on low confidence levels = high likelihood it’s just a fluke) or considering if the control was even decent.

As an aside, tons of diet studies compare a specific diet to the standard American diet. If you know what that means, it’s not hard to see why any new diet is “healthy.” The control is so miserably bad that any diet that forces a person to think about what they eat is healthier.

Why so many marketing experts get it wrong?

Because they aren’t experts in conversion rate optimization.

Let’s exclude all the wanna-be experts from this. There’s a “marketing expert” at every corner of the internet. Including them seems pointless. Let’s narrow this down to people with at least a few years of experience and $100,000+ of fees behind them.

Take a random sample of them. Very few of them focus on conversion rate optimization, even though many of them do some A/B testing in their own business or with clients.

CRO is a tricky topic. I did it for a few years as my primary focus. But it’s been a couple of years since I really dedicated myself to it. I know more than most marketing people (over half of my clients were and still are marketing experts), but there are people/companies that are clearly ahead of me now in CRO, so I only sell basic-level help with it.

But if you’ve never been fully in that world, you don’t know the difference between knowing the basics, being great, and being truly one of the best. It easily looks like knowing some basics and doing a lot of A/B tests is enough for great results.

That’s why many non-CRO-expert marketing experts share the common best practices, which include the “test one small change at a time” idea. They genuinely think it’s good advice because it makes sense in other contexts (i.e., scientific inquiry).

Why so many “conversion rate optimization” companies get it wrong?

Because they aren’t CRO companies. They’re web development companies that portray themselves as CRO companies.

There’s a huge over-supply of web development. There’s a meaningful under-supply of CRO help. For a lay person, those two look damn similar. So, lots of mediocre web development companies claim to be doing CRO when they really only recite some basics about “user experience” and “conversion best practices” and then sell a new website based on whatever template they use.

I talk with people almost every week who have spent tens of thousands on multiple website redesigns that all failed to create a meaningful improvement (decreases in sales, on the other hand, are surprisingly common). Usually at least some of those web development companies called themselves “conversion experts.”

So, they share the same “best practices” because they’re just as oblivious to their ineffectiveness as most others.

How to do effective A/B testing

Here’s the $1mil secret:

1. Start with completely different versions of whatever you’re testing. Don’t just move a form to the other edge of the screen. Don’t just reword the headline. Don’t just use different images. Instead, have completely different pages, ads, emails, or whatever else you’re working on. Especially test the message—what you’re saying with the piece of marketing—since that makes the biggest difference to your results.
2. Once you’ve found the best starting point, move on to slightly less drastic changes. A/B test the focus of the page, change the image in an ad, or start the email with what you previously had as the ending.
3. Keep moving gradually to smaller and smaller changes. When you no longer see meaningful improvements often enough to justify the effort, move on to A/B testing something else.

That’s it. Sort of.

What complicates things is that you need to figure out what big changes are likely to create meaningful differences, what other things need to change when you make one change to keep things aligned, and how to manage the whole process.

Doing CRO at the highest level isn’t easy. But copying the basic rules of A/B testing from the people whose clients consistently see 50-500% increases in profit within a year makes a lot more sense than relying on the flawed “best practices.”

It’s better to do one big change in a week that’s likely to create a big difference than 100 small changes that won’t create nearly the same difference. Prioritize quality over quantity.

If you only have resources (time, money, energy) for small quick tests, you’re likely to get better results by using those resources on other things.

As a final note, there’s a lot more to high-level CRO than starting with big changes. But it’s really the only big secret behind effective A/B testing.

The post Effective A/B testing is a pipe dream for most — how the top pros multiply sales first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

The post Effective A/B testing is a pipe dream for most — how the top pros multiply sales appeared first on Peter Sandeen.

You might think the usual click rates are fine since all the email marketing programs and nearly all marketing experts talk about them.

But let’s be clear: the usual way of counting email click-through rates is stupid.

If you don’t understand the problem, you’ll look at the wrong numbers, likely interpret them wrong, and make the wrong decisions for your business.

What are the normal email click-through rates?

If you send an email to 1000 people and 25 of them click a link, email marketing programs tell you the click-through rate is 2.5%.

They didn’t count it wrong. They just counted the wrong thing.

The right email click-through rates

The key is to consider the open rate first.

If you send an email to 1000 people, 250 of them open it, and 25 of them click a link, the normal click-through rate is 2.5%.

But compared to the opens, that’s a 10% click-through rate.

So, why count it based on opens, instead of recipients?

What should you learn based on click-through rates?

Usually people see click rates as indications of how many people are interested in the topic of the email and/or what the email promotes. Or they view it as an overall “how good this email was” score.

That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s like evaluating the tastiness of food at a restaurant based on empty plates. Maybe the food is good. Maybe the portions are too small. Maybe something else.

You should first consider the open rate of an email. Assuming your subject line is clear about the email’s topic, a high open rate is a sign of people being interested in the topic.

Even when counting it based on opens, the click-through rate isn’t a perfectly accurate measure. You need to consider the context before reaching conclusions.

However, there are some common correlations.

A high click-through rate:

• The people who opened the email want to learn more about the topic than what’s included in the email.
• What you wrote to convince people to click the link was compelling.

A low click-through rate:

• The email didn’t keep them interested for long enough to reach the link.
• People misunderstood the topic of the email based on the subject line (i.e., they wanted to read about what they thought the email was about, not what it actually was about).
• There’s a mismatch between what the email is about and what the link promises.
• What you wrote to convince people to click the link wasn’t compelling.
• They got what they wanted from the email directly, so they didn’t have a reason to click.

What are high and low click-through rates?

Unfortunately, what is a “good” click rate depends on the context. Here are a few things that affect what click rates you should expect:

• How recently people have joined your list
• How aggressively you’ve cleaned your list
• What the open rate is (e.g., if very few people open an email, it can be an indication of the subject line being anything but intriguing, which means the few who opened the email are more likely to be truly interested in the topic)
• How long the email is
• What the link leads to
• How clearly you tell in the email what’s behind the link
• And so on…

But generally speaking, a good click-through rate (counted compared to opens) is 3-7% for the usual broadcast email for your general marketing email list. For more selective lists (e.g., customers, recent new subscribers, people who specifically joined a launch promo list), you’d hope for higher numbers.

However, even much lower numbers are sometimes fine. For example, my Friday scribbles emails often have an article (similar to this, but shorter) that ends with a single sentence or short paragraph mentioning the option of getting help. Here’s what it could look like:

“If you want to get better results with email marketing (or marketing generally), maybe I can help. Just reply to this email and tell me what you’re struggling with. Or you can read this page to learn a bit more about what I do.”

A 1% click-through rate in that context is high.

Another warning about how email marketing programs count click-through rates

Email marketing programs reports click rates as a single number.

If you have many different links in an email, you need to dig deeper into the data to see which links people click. But generally, you should avoid having multiple different links in an email. Rather focus your efforts to “selling” a single next step.

If you’re on my list and get the weekly Friday scribbles emails, you know I break that rule almost every time. The “tidbits” at the end of each email often have links.

But those emails aren’t normal marketing emails.

The goal is to share something practical (the first part of the email). Hopefully, when you want to grow your business, you’ve seen that I make it easy to understand and practical. Also, when I do a webinar, you hopefully know it’s going to be practical (not a 90-minute sales pitch), so you have a good reason to show up.

So, the emails don’t primarily aim for an immediate sale like many normal marketing emails.

The tidbits are included because they’re fun. I have fun with them, and I get replies from people who enjoyed them all the time. 

Also, even if the main topic isn’t relevant for you one week, the tidbits might still give you a great laugh, spark an interesting thought, or something else.

Without them, the only differences compared to the usual marketing emails you probably get every day would be practicality (my promise is that every Friday scribble is truly practical—not just “practical” the way marketing people use the word), lack of a direct sales pitch, and frequency (most weeks only that one email).

If you don’t already get the Friday scribbles emails, click here now.

The post Normal email click-through rates are stupid first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

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Showing what makes you weird is risky. But it feels much riskier than it really is. That’s true in our personal lives and business.

It follows the “10-89-1% rule” (that I just made up).

For example, I’m quite geeky. I like riddles (example at the end), difficult puzzles (e.g., Hanayama level 6), a couple of video games (mainly LoL), playing cards (it’s like collecting small art), physics/math (example at the end), and philosophy (I can spend hours with a philosopher friend talking about a single question—last time it was this thought experiment).

Now to the 10-89-1% rule.

10-89-1% rule of being weird

10% of people now relate to me a little more because I just shared some fairly odd things about me. They feel more welcomed by me because they know we’re alike—even if we don’t share the exact same weirdnesses. They’re more likely to consume my content and eventually get my help.

89% of people don’t think much of it. Many of them nonetheless feel more welcomed by me because it’s easier to feel that when the other person shares something personal. And perhaps I’m slightly more memorable than the next marketing person because I don’t just talk about “the next awesome tactic for you to spend a few months on.”

1% of people absolutely lose their poop. They think there’s no way I could be trusted because “only kids play video games and like puzzles.” Or maybe they’re worried that getting coaching from me is like working with the Riddler (instead of getting the most practical step-by-step instructions possible ;-). Or that there’s some other connection between my ability to teach marketing and the things I listed.

The 1% with nothing better to do

The problem is that the last 1% are those who make their opinion heard the loudest. Like the people who told me it was “inappropriate” to use the phrase “motivation is bullshit” when my point was to underline the absurdity of waiting to be motivated to do something you know you should do (because motivation generally doesn’t come when you need it most).

It’s because those last 1% that showing your weird sides feels riskier than it is. That leads to plenty of personal hurt, but also lots of missed business opportunities.

All this came to my mind when I saw Ryan Reinolds’s latest video (note: it’s an alcohol ad). It’s one long joke (with such an obscure reference at the end I can’t believe more than 1% of viewers would understand it).

But it was great specifically because it was so weird. I have zero interest in gin, but if I ever want some, I’ll see if I can find his brand. Not because I’d think it’s better than others, but because I enjoy the humor and the gin would remind me of that.

Similarly, there are people who won’t get the joke in his video promoting “Detective Pikachu.” (By the way, missed opportunity: the movie could’ve been called “P.I. Kachu.”) And if the joke happens to be sarcastic, that’s more than 1% of people because apparently more than 1% of people hit their heads one too many times as a kid and permanently injured their humorellum—the most important brain region. It’s truly tragic, so let’s remember how hard life with brain damage must be when they leave negative comments, reply angrily via email, or say hateful things on Twitter when all you did was make a sarcastic joke.

The 10% who get the joke

The 1% are not the people you were talking to anyway. By showing your weirder sides, you’re talking to the 10%. And you’re making them far more likely to buy. Losing potential sales from 1% to increase odds of making sales to 10% is a great deal.

If you share something personal that’s a little weird, there’s something for people to really grasp. Sure, lots of people can relate to my being married, having dogs, living in a house with a yard, and having an iPhone. But no one’s going to think, “He’s just like me!” based on such commonplace things.

This all relates closely to your story, as well. It’s worth talking about separately, so I won’t go into that more here.

It also feels good not to hide what you’re like. Whether it’s your sense of humor, enjoyment of puzzles, or something else, hiding it is rarely a good idea (although, far too often, it’s still a matter of life and death—not the interest in puzzles, but things like non-heterosexuality or some political views).

Show some skin, but don’t write an autobiography

Note that there’s a difference between hiding something and it simply not coming up. You don’t need to share everything. No one (except maybe your mother) cares to know that much.

For example, I can sew. It doesn’t come up often, but that’s not because I hide it—it just rarely comes up. Similarly, I enjoy high places, think “Rick and Morty” is perhaps the greatest TV show ever, and I love card magic.

Don’t “share everything.” Instead, think of something personal you could share. Something the kind of people you’d like to have as customers might see as interesting and/or relatable. Something “weird”—as in something that’s different compared to others in your industry.

Then share those weird sides in your marketing. Mention them directly or just include them between the lines. Give the 10% something to relate to—something that helps them want more from you.

A bit of randomness—just because I like it

I include “tidbits” to the end of my “Friday scribbles” emails just because I like a bit of randomness in otherwise predictable things (like emails), and it’s a fun way to share things I find interesting. Given the feedback I get about them, plenty of other people like the idea (that I copied from Tim Ferriss…thanks Tim), too.

Here are this week’s tidbits, so you get the idea:

• Good news for cat lovers: More specifically, lovers of one particular theoretical cat. Physicists have figured out how to predict when Schrödinger’s cat will jump (and finally save it). And because this is the only chance I’ll ever get to tell this joke (that I heard from Physics Girl): What is Schrödinger’s cat’s favorite theory? … String theory. (Get it? … Geek humor.)
• The best riddle/paradox I’ve heard—maybe ever: It’s called “boy or girl paradox.” Here’s my short version of it: You meet some parents. Each of them have two children (25% have two boys, 50% have a boy and a girl, 25% have two girls). They all named their firstborn girl Erika (if they had a girl). You have a conversation with two of them and they both have one of their children with them. Person A says, “she’s my daughter” and person B says, “she’s my daughter named Erika.” The odds of person A having another daughter at home are 50%, but the odds of person B having two daughters are 33,3%. Can you see why the name changes the odds?
• One of the best parts about Finnish language: We don’t have gender-specific pronouns. We only have a generic third-person pronoun “hän” that substitutes “he,” “she,” and all other gender pronouns. On that note, Happy Pride Month! The month when even Finnish people wear less than 50% shades of grey. (Get it? … I feel like calling that “literary humor” would be a stretch given the literary quality of the reference.)

If you’d like possibly the most practical marketing advice each week with a dash of randomness at the end, join now to get this/next week’s Friday scribbles (it’s free and you can unsubscribe if the puns are too much for you).

Note about non-single-person brands

Even if a company has a marketing department the size of a small army, the brand can still have personality. For example, Innocent (juice brand) is a good example of building around a goofy and cute image.

Or take Wendy’s and their well-known snarky style on social media. If you like sarcasm and snarky humor, you probably like Wendy’s (even if you don’t eat their food).

The point is to stay consistent, even if marketing is created by a bunch of people.

That said, an alternative is something, for example, Wistia does. They share (although not as prevalently as I’d like) the personalities of the individual people. There’s still a sense of consistency, but it doesn’t come from everyone having the same odd hobbies, but rather the way they’re presented.

The post Share your weirdness and make more sales first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

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The traditional approach to targeting hasn’t changed much. Ask anyone with a traditional marketing or business education, and they can recite the steps like the alphabets.

There’s clearly plenty of value in defining your target customer the traditional way. However, that doesn’t mean it’s all you need if you want to do effective marketing.

Traditional target customer

The traditional approach aims to answer “Where will you find them and how will you recognize them?”

The main questions to answer are things like (some for B-to-B, others for B-to-C, some for both):

• What’s their revenue?
• Where are they located / where do they live?
• What industry are they in?
• How many employees do they have?
• How much money do they make?
• What education level do they have?
• How good are they at golf/cooking/etc.?

These are useful things to know. For example, you can choose whom to send your direct mail ads to. And you can figure out which TV shows they’re most likely to watch and have your ads run during those shows.

And most obviously, this sort of targeting is used by salespeople who need to figure out whom to cold call.

Those questions can also help figure out your messaging—what you need to communicate, so people want to buy. But they aren’t meant for that, and their impact on messaging is usually very slight.

My approach to defining your target customer

The key question is, “What is their perspective to what you sell?”

If you sell golf clubs, what do they think about golf, their swing, etc.? What do they think are the reasons they can’t get better scores? What do they want from golfing? And so on.

If you sell an accounting software, what do they find frustrating about their current software? What problems do they have related to payroll? What sort of expectations do they have related to accounting software? And so on.

Those types of questions help you find out what could make them see value in what you sell and want to buy.

My primary service is developing value propositions—figuring out what exact ideas/beliefs would make people see the value in what you sell and want to buy it. So, I have to define your target customer based on their perspective.

In other words, your target customers are people who share the same perspective. If they’d have different perspectives to what you sell, they’d need to see different things to want to buy from you.

Sometimes their revenue, location, industry, skill, etc. make a big difference to their perspective. And even if they don’t make a difference to your messaging, you should still know the answers to the traditional targeting questions. Just don’t expect those to be enough for effective messaging.

Problems of traditional targeting

Here are a few of the common problems people face when they try to figure out their value proposition, messaging, or what they should say in their marketing (all basically the same thing), but they’ve only defined their target customer the traditional way:

• “We know the value people get from us, but we can’t figure out how to condense it.”
• “We need to say different things to each prospect.”
• “Our marketing doesn’t have a clear message. It’s just general info about our products/services.”
• “Most people we talk with understand the value we provide, but it takes 15 minutes or longer to get there.”
• “Even the people who understand how valuable our products/services would be for them end up buying from our competitors.”

If you don’t know what to say to make people want what you sell, it’s going to be hard to make sales. Maybe you’ll make some sales with great effort. But that’s not scalable, predictable, or usually even sustainable.

The first thing you’ll need to do is define your target customer—based on their perspective, not based on how you categorize them. Don’t try to use the traditional target customer exercises for something they aren’t meant for.

Want to define your target customer and know what to say in marketing?

Defining your target customer is the first step in creating a strong value proposition, so I do it all the time. If you’re interested, get in contact, so we can talk. Maybe I’m the right person to help you—and if not, at least I can give some new perspective to your situation.

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There are other effective copywriting options. But they’re rare and relatively hard to use, so if you’re thinking of breaking the rule (rule: “use this structure”), be careful—it doesn’t usually end well.

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More details for the structure (based on what people asked about)…

Effective copywriting is about predicting how a conversation will unfold

Imagine you walk up to two people having a conversation. You don’t know them, and they don’t know you.

What happens if you ask them to listen to you talk about X? They’re unlikely to be interested. If they can, they find a way to get rid of you.

What happens if, instead, you say something interesting related to the topic they’re talking about? It’s still a weird situation, but at least you have a chance to join in.

That’s the idea with joining their conversation in copywriting, although you join a conversation in someone’s head—not between two people.

In marketing, the usual way to go about doing it is to describe their situation, their problems, their dreams, or something else they’re already thinking of. In the video I mentioned you can describe “what they see.” The point is, don’t start with your perspective. Rather, join in on what they already think and believe. Just like if you want to join a conversation between strangers, your odds of getting heard go up if you make it clear immediately that you agree with their perspective.

For example, imagine they’re having a conversation (in their head) about how to find the time to make healthy food for their family. How could you join that conversation? Would you talk about 10 reasons healthy food is great? I hope not. Instead, you could say, “Here are 10 ways to make healthy food faster.”

Copywriting isn’t that different from talking with someone. It only seems different.

It might seem impossible to have a conversation with someone when you don’t actually get to respond to what they say. It might seem impossible to know what they would think, what they would ask, and what they would need to hear—and in what order—to feel like it’s a conversation.

A great sales page is like one side of a natural conversation. The writer predicted what the other side would think and say. If the prediction was off, the conversation doesn’t make sense, and the page doesn’t convert.

Even though you aren’t there, you can direct the conversation where you want it to go

It’s not like you wouldn’t have a lot of power to direct the conversation as the writer. Just like in a normal conversation, we direct conversations all the time.

When you tell a friend a funny story about something you saw earlier that day, you direct the conversation. When you point out what they misunderstand about something, you direct the conversation. When you tell them you believe they can reach their goals, you direct the conversation.

When you tell the reader a story, correct a misunderstanding, or show how to reach an outcome, you direct the conversation in a sales page.

For example, if I say, “You know there’s just one thing you’re missing from your marketing, right?” you’re likely to answer, “Okay, what do you think it is? You better have good reasoning for such a bold statement.” I should then tell what I think is missing and explain why that’s the case. If I don’t—if instead I talk about something else—you’re likely to lose interest because you can’t feel like you’re a part of the conversation (because I didn’t answer your question).

That’s what effective copywriting is about. Direct the conversation to the topics and ideas you need people to understand, so they want to buy.

Show them the best way forward—then enable it

A lot of effective copywriting is based on first teaching people how to solve a problem or reach a goal and then selling them the “tool” the solution is based on.

For example, “To get the most out of exercise, you need to do it at the right intensity. Your heart rate is a key factor in that. Depending on your goals, you should aim for different heart rates. Well, here’s a heart rate monitor that comes with instructions on what heart rate you should aim for depending on what’s your goal.”

The “tool” doesn’t need to be a physical object.

For example, “Two things make the biggest difference to how quickly you move forward with your business. First, are you doing the right things? If you do things that don’t work in your situation, you’re wasting time. Second, are you doing them in the right way? Most things in marketing and business can be done in many different ways, but usually only one fits your situation. So, what about getting some marketing coaching, so you spend your time doing the right things and doing them the right way?”

In the sales page structure (in the video), I mention you need to show how your offer fits in with the way to their goals. The above examples are simplified, but that’s what they do. They show how to reach a goal and how the offer helps with it.

The post The 5-step structure used in almost all effective copywriting first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

The post The 5-step structure used in almost all effective copywriting appeared first on Peter Sandeen.

You can solve a problem. Cool. So what?

You can help people reach a goal. Nice. So what?

What more do people need before they’re at the point they really dreamed of when they bought from you? Why should they really care about what you’re offering them?

For example, no one hires me to get more sales. They hire me to provide a better life for their family. To make a difference in more people’s lives. To be free to live the life they want.

No matter how menial the product or service you sell is, there’s a greater goal it relates to. With marketing, the connection is quite clear. It’s not always so.

Let’s say you sell coffee beans. The greater goal your customers have could be about feeling energetic and getting things done effortlessly. It could be a number of other things, but let’s say that’s your target customer.

Coffee helps your customers get closer to that goal, but no one’s going to think it’s enough. And that’s why coffee is mostly a commodity. You might cut prices until there’s nearly no profit left. Or you could try to make a big deal of how sunny the hills the coffee was grown on are, but you aren’t the only one whose coffee saw some sun (so, why would people care?).

What would, then, be a superior offer?

Let’s rethink the whole thing. Instead of just selling coffee beans to people who happen to walk by your store or stumble onto your site one day, let’s sell a monthly subscription. And let’s make it $97. Or $197. Per month.

Clearly that’s not just a bag of coffee beans anymore. We need to give people a lot more than their daily caffeine spike. We need to help them get closer to that dream of feeling energetic and getting things done.

Here’s our new offer (i.e., what we sell).

It’s a monthly subscription that includes:

• An exclusive presentation each month by a productivity or health related expert
• A customers-only Facebook group where anyone can ask for help if they don’t know how to do something, so they won’t get stuck
• An online course on how to optimize their diet, so they have energy throughout the day
• A monthly package of supplements that help them feel energetic every day from morning to evening
• An online course on how to improve their brain function, so they get more things done and have better ideas effortlessly
• A monthly package of supplements that help their brain work at its best
• An online course on how to structure their days to work with—not against—their natural circadian rhythm (sleep cycle)

At $97/month that’s a steal. Even at $197/month, it’s still perfectly reasonable if the monthly presentations are good and the Facebook group works well. (Details definitely require more polishing.) Sure, this offer comes with its own challenges, but generally, the better the offer, the more manageable the challenges are and the higher the rewards for solving them.

All that is to say, before you cut your prices, consider if you can improve your offer instead.

And yes, you can still sell coffee by the bag if someone’s buying. Having a new, better offer doesn’t mean you have to scrap everything else about your business.

The post How to avoid price competition with a superior offer first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

The post How to avoid price competition with a superior offer appeared first on Peter Sandeen.

There are ways to turn that disappointment into something that drives them toward buying quickly (which is a topic for another time). But in many cases that’s not an option. So, how do you avoid disappointing people with time-limited offers.

Here are a few ideas…

1. Make the time-limit personal.

How you set this up depends on what the offer is like. The most common situation is that people join your email list and get a time-limited offer immediately. The time-limit can be 10 minutes, 30 days, or something else. In any case, it’s a personal time-limit, so no one misses it because they found out about you too late.

2. Use “natural” deadlines.

What is a “natural” deadline varies from case to case, but it means a deadline that people instinctively understand to be reasonable. The most obvious ones relate to seasonal holidays. But for example, a Kickstarter campaign has a natural deadline (the end of the campaign).

If you can’t think of a natural time-limit, you can create artificial natural-feeling deadlines, too. For example, you can say, “I’m going to do 1-hour consultations—and nothing but 1-hour consultations—for the entire month of November. But after that, the minimum contract is 600 hours.”

Another option, “I set a goal for myself to generate $200,000 during the month of November. We’re three weeks in, and I’m only 65% of the way there, so for the rest of the month, you can buy any service or product you like at 20% discount, so I reach my goal.”

3. Run time-limited offers all the time.

This doesn’t completely negate the problem. But if everyone can take advantage of at least some time-limited offer, they probably don’t feel so disappointed they missed the previous ones.

4. Announce the time-limited offer privately.

Simply put, if someone can’t take advantage of an offer (because it’s already over or any other reason), don’t even let them know about it. For example, on an ecommerce site, make sure your homepage doesn’t have a huge banner saying, “75% off everything until YESTERDAY!”

More marketing ideas like this?

If you’d like more of this kind of advice (concise and to-the-point), that’s what my emails are about. Click here to get a weekly “Friday scribbles” email (and the occasional other email) with exactly this type of content.

The post How to run a time-limited offer without disappointing people who miss it? first appeared on Peter Sandeen.

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