#77/111: Hitting The Sweet Spot

What is it about?

Why can you convince your parents so easily? Because you know them. You know what they want, who they are and what they value. If you could know your customers as good as your parents, you could create astonishing advertising.

What can I learn?

Hard data first: The first step is to learn about the market in general. Read statistics about the person’s sociodemographic, read trade publications and websites about the market. This should help you to get a big picture about the market and its needs.

Understand your customer: The next step is to actually understand them. A good way is to live like one and talk to others in the same segment. You want to really understand them, i.e. you don’t ask “do you prefer product X over Y?”. You should ask what their goals in life are, whether they prefer freedom over security and what they would do if they don’t have to work. You want insights not just facts.

Connect your customers and your brand: To hit the sweet spot you have to connect your brand/product with the customer insight. A nice example is Harley-Davidson. The customers want freedom, they want to be different and non-boring. Harley-Davidson offers exactly this. They embody these values and that leads to astonishing loyalty among their buyers.

Conclusion

Hitting The Sweet Spot by Lisa Fortini-Campbell is pretty nice. It’s short, concise and full of examples. About the last 100 pages are examples of people using the methods described in this book. I can only recommend reading this book because you are deepening your understanding of successful marketing campaigns. Recommendation.

#71/111: The Ultimate Sales Letter

What is it about?

Why should you bother learning about sales letters if you have an online business? Because there’s still text to write. Dan S. Kennedy shows the fundamentals about writing a good sales letter.

What can I learn?

Learn about your customer: The first and foremost thing is learning about your customer. You can only address your prospects if you know what they want and what there problems are. An easy way is to read things they read. Ads, websites, magazines, etc.

Use proven swipes: Swipes are text snippets from other ads. Some examples of proven swipes are “How to X in Y days”, “Are you Z?”, etc. They are proven, they work. Use them and save time and money.

Argument against Objections: If you read the last review you’ll know that direct marketing is salesmanship-in-print. Therefore you must address the reader’s objections. Why should I buy your product instead of competitor X’s? Why should I spend $25 dollars on a paid-solution instead of the free one? The best method to discover these questions is to try to sell your product in person.

Conclusion

The Ultimate Sales Letter is a nice book. However, if you compare it to Commonsense Direct & Digital Marketing it’s clearly inferior. What’s really bothering me is that Dan Kennedy tries to sell his services and products of other peoples in this book. This is bad, ruins his credibility and worsens the book fundamentally.

#60/111: Ice to the Eskimos

What is it about?

So, you got the worst NBA team and now it’s time to fill their stadium and actually make money. Too hard? Ask Jon Spoelstra who achieved this with the New Jersey Nets.

What can I learn?

The Quick Fix Silver Bullet: What would you do first? Buy a new team? Run commercials? There is an easier way. Increase the frequency of purchases of your existing customers. Use direct mailing and send them special offers. Spoelstra created special packages for the top games, i.e. when the NJ Jets played against the Dallas Mavericks or Chicago Bulls.

Make your customer a real-life hero: This idea is ingenious. Jon Spoelstra had to sell sponsorships for a lousy NBA team. Everyone would be considered stupid if they would sponsor such a team. How did Spoelstra did this? He made the people who bought sponsorships real-life heroes. The New Jersey Nets sent the CEOs of the sponsoring companies and their contact person high-quality prints which included pictures of every appearance and showed how much impact they had. This impressed the CEOs and often led to the promotion of the contact person.

Make it too good of a deal: If there’s no recognition of value, price cuts won’t increase your sales enough. However, you can increase the value of your offering. Spoelstra added baseball caps or a meal to the tickets. A all-you-can eat buffet and five tickets for a game for just $29. That’s a deal too good to be true!

Conclusion

I just covered three of nineteen chapters and they are nearly all great. Ice to the Eskimos impressed me extremely and was interesting although I have no clue about the NBA. I think this book is was Attention! wanted to be – clever, unusual and stuffed with actionable advice. Recommendation!

#59/111: game-based marketing

What is it about?

Not just the social web makes customer relationship more interactive. There is more. Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder tell us about using games as a marketing tool.

What can I learn?

Achiever, Socializer, Explorer and Killer: Richard Bartle, a game researcher, analyzed different types of gamers. The achiever wants to gain updates or collection points. The Socializer doesn’t really focus on winning the game rather chatting and helping other people. The Explorers like to find new worlds, new features and go into depth. Furthermore, there are the Killers who will do nearly everything to win including cheating.

Public recognition as incentive: There is more than money. People like to get public recognition. You can use badges or leader boards. These two things motivates the Achiever, Explorer and the Killer and having these people will please the Socializers. This makes leaders boards and badges are very mighty tool.

Build longtime games: Some companies use games successfully today. McDonald’s do so with McDonald’s Monopoly. It is easy to play, easy to join but hard to master. Though the main problem is that is only temporary. A great example for longtime games are frequent-flyer programs. There are multiple levels (1m mile club, etc) and there is public recognition in form of cards or access to special locations.

Conclusion

game-based marketing is a solid book. It explains common used methods today and doesn’t neglect the research. Though the book isn’t really visionary although there is, I think, a big opportunity and market in using games as a marketing tool. Good fundamental book.