This short post will walk you through how to generate leads without relying on spray-and-pray marketing. The answer lies in 1) finding a high-priority problem that your target customer must act on and 2) that problem should have a quickly approaching deadline for your target customer. I'll illustrate how solving such problems can liven up your marketing and inform a new approach to marketing altogether.
A few days after Halloween, my window cleaner gave me a call. He must have been calling to sell me another round of window cleaning. Perhaps he wanted to tell me about a winter special promo that he was running. To my surprise, he offered to hang my Christmas lights on the exterior of my house, and he quoted me a reasonable price. It's as if he read my mind. The time, effort, and timing of when I was going to knock that to-do off my list were very top of mind for me that week. After hanging up the phone, I googled 'residential Christmas lights installation near me', which turned up a few results. So, I called those local businesses for a rough quote. It turns out that my window cleaner quoted me 50% less than his lights-installation competitors.
I started thinking, why would my window cleaner offer such a service? Is lights-installation a huge market? Probably not. Can lights-installation provide year-round revenue? Nope. But, because installing holiday lights is something many households will prioritize during holiday months, such a service, even if offered at cost or low margin, can...
Marketing experts often say that buyers don’t care about features alone. ‘Buyers care about how your product will benefit them.’ But benefits alone can often fall short. Benefits alone can’t carry a buyer from where they are today, risk-averse and standing still, to taking a chance on an unfamiliar solution that will cost them time, money, and/or effort.
Use plain language, simplify buying decisions, and focus on buyer pain points. siggi's yogurt brand thrives in a fiercely competitive category by matching its messaging to the way people make buying decisions. This brief post breaks down each messaging insight and provides examples.
Learning SEO can be a daunting task. Given the dizzying volume of advice out there, it's not easy to pin down what 'good SEO' means or how to get started. In such cases, it's best to skip all the high-level theory and go straight to the bottom: the actual tools used by SEO professionals.
This guide will help you figure out Todoist and get started in 20 minutes. It's a walkthrough of how I personally use the app to manage my life and keep the stress levels at bay.
I decided it was time to build a product and sell it myself, without a large team and a big budget. So I joined Indie Hackers and sold a productized service.
When a big product or strategy decision looms on the horizon, different teams often have opinions that are at odds with one another. You might ask, can’t quantitative data resolve such conflicts of opinion?
A common perception: If I ask a customer how to improve a fan, they’ll ask for a bigger fan, not an AC. If Henry Ford asked people what they want, they would have asked for a faster horse, not a car.
About 1 in 5 founders resist paying for customer interviews. But let's explore the other side of the coin. What are you giving up if you insist on free customer interviews?
Photo by Ian MacDonald on Unsplash