What leads your clients to look for a solution like yours? What makes them realize they have a problem? The answers to these questions matter. Because when you know your clients’ buying triggers, you can: Build your product/service for their context Talk to their real needs with your messaging Target them more easily Think about the buying triggers in our lives. Like becoming a parent. Your life changes when you learn you’ll become a parent. You start looking for parenting books, furniture...
19 days ago • 1 min read
Having clarity around your brand’s positioning has a hidden upside. We usually talk about how it helps you win clients. It raises your perceived value. It makes buyers choose you over others. But it also changes things inside the business. You know what they say. Constraints breed creativity. A blank page is scary because you can write anything. There is no constraint. But once you pick a topic, ideas start flowing. You get focused. You get creative. Clear positioning does the same. It gives...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
We’ve talked about why most push marketing tactics fail and how to do it right. Today, let’s focus on pull. Here’s why most organic content doesn’t deliver results and how to fix it to attract clients: - The Soviet Union had a shortage of nails during Lenin’s government. To increase production, Soviet officials started setting quotas for the number of nails factories to produce. Factories wanted to avoid punishment. So after hearing about the quotas, they reduced the size of the nails to...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
You might have seen it on the news. On Monday, there was a blackout in Spain (where I live) for 12 hours. No electricity. No phone line. No traffic lights, no metros, no trains. Some people got stuck in elevators for hours. Some others couldn’t buy food since they didn’t have cash. Total chaos. When something like this happens, everybody has one question in mind: “Why did it happen?” What authorities know is that there was a “sudden loss of 15GW electricity generation in five seconds,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
In 2012, Hubspot was bleeding customers. They spent a lot of resources on customer acquisition. But customers didn’t stick around and churned out after a few months. So their customer lifetime value was low. That meant they couldn’t increase marketing budgets further and hire a bigger team to scale. Hubspot’s executive team realized they had to fix the retention problem or growth would stall forever. But the question was: how? They had already tried small improvements to their services here...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
You know this as a buyer. When you plan to buy a B2B service, you go to that brand’s website. You read the homepage. You try to understand what they do, how they do it, and how they are different. And based on what you see, you form an opinion and make a decision: to take the next step with that brand or not. Well, your potential buyers do the same too. That’s why your home page is important. It’s not a conversion-first channel like a landing page. But it’s more of an introduction and...
2 months ago • 3 min read
You know about this. Marketing tactics fall into two categories: push and pull. “Push” tactics are interruptions. They interrupt a potential buyer and ask for an action. Meanwhile, “pull” tactics are the opposite. You make buyers come to you by offering them content they might be interested in. There is an inherent problem with push tactics. Effective push tactics get overused. And as they are interruptions, people become immune to them. One example is banner ads on websites. In 1994, AT&T...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Think about it. How come some brands have passionate believers like political parties? People even do irrational stuff for some brands. Like getting into a line at 5 a.m. to buy products or defending it against negative comments online as if somebody cursed their mother. It’s almost like some brands become part of customers’ identities. But how does that happen? What causes a brand to turn from just a random business into a part of buyers’ identity? Well, one answer to this question is...
3 months ago • 5 min read
What brands come to your mind when you hear "accounting firms"? You can probably list 3-4 brands. First, you’d think about Deloitte. Then you’d continue with the other ones you know, like PwC, Ernst & Young, your own accountant, etc. The same applies if I tell you “toothpaste” or “energy drink.” Buyers remember a shortlist of brands in every category. Jack Trout and Al Ries called it category ladders. If the category is a high-interest one or has a high purchase frequency, the ladder gets...
3 months ago • 4 min read
