Archives for August 2020

Ah, You Got Me… (The 4M framework)

August 27, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Ketchup, chips, and chlorine.

Take any one of them away, and it wouldn't be the same experience.

That was the smell of the local Drexelbrook, PA pool when I was growing up. Technically, that's called a lido, in British English.

Do you remember the kids game Marco-Polo? Usually played in a pool, one kid shuts their eyes and yells "Marco". The rest of the cub-pack yell "Polo".

"Marco"
"Polo""Polo""Polo""Polo"
"Marco"
"Polo""Polo""Polo""Polo"
"Marco"
"Polo""Polo""Polo""Pol-ah you got me"

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Based on sound and touch, "Marco" chases a "Polo". Once touched, that "Polo" becomes a "Marco".

Touching anyone who isn't playing doesn't do anything, though.

Sculptural bust of traveler Marco Polo. — Photographer: Egor Myznik | Source: Unsplash

Named after a 13th century explorer, who bumbled his way in the dark from Europe to China (the center of all civilization at the time), the children's game hooks into something primal. It keeps kids engaged for hours at a time.

Marketer and designer Nathan Barry has previously pointed out that this game also serves as an analogy for call-response.

Direct response, even. You only want to be chasing after the Polos, and avoiding everyone else in the pool.

That's my kind of marketing.

The Marco-Polo analogy holds really well for what it's like to enter a new market. You know there are people interested. You want to catch them, yet avoid everyone else.

You just need to figure out how to reach the "Polos". Speak to them. Hook into what interests them.

There's three more twists, though, compared to shouting "Marco" in a pool:

You can use any medium you want to reach them, not just yelling at the top of your voice: advertising, free content, phone calls, events, or anything else.
You can optimize what you say, not just "Marco", to attract & identify the "Polos".
You can be really smart about choosing the first "Polos" you want to pursue.

This is exactly the situation you're in, when launching a product. I call it medium-market-message match. The 4Ms. 😀

Choosing a channel and message and market can feel like choosing an elevator

Choosing media is an interesting game. Essentially, you're tapping into other people's existing audiences, and putting a message in front of them. Depending on how relevant that message is for that particular audience, more people will "convert". And then you can be smart about who you actually go after.

Pol-ah, you got me.

And the best way of testing these combinations?

Why, never thought you'd ask.

Landing Page MVPs.

There's a good book on this topic called Launch Tomorrow. Arguably, I'm not the best person to judge that, since I wrote it. But I'm right anyway–this time.

It goes into constructing constructing tests around the 4Ms. Put all of your ducks in a row.

Catch the "polos" who are keen to hear what you have to say.

Even better, build products which are popular with lots of "polos".

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How To Pitch A Product’s Benefits, Without Sounding Like A Hype Windbag

August 21, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

I'm not going to shock you when I say that landing pages live and die by how well they persuade. And bullets form the foundation of any persuasive message you put out there. They're specific points which you expect will persuade the reader or listener.

Photographer: amirali mirhashemian | Source: Unsplash

Truth is, though, that your reader comes across thousands of marketing messages per day. You need to have a way of persuading them, without invoking an automatic "yeah, right" type of response. If you do it the right way, you can talk about getting rich quick, body part enlargement, or any other product idea and still be convincing.

First and foremost, be clear on the benefits you're providing. Ted Levitt of Harvard noted that "People buying a 1/4 inch drill bit don't want a 1/4 inch drill bit, they want a 1/4 inch hole." Focus as much as you can on the benefits of your solution, not on the features. Nobody cares about the drill or how it works. They are willing to pay for the result. You will always be most persuasive by looking through the customer's eyes.

It's a common mistake to see lists of features next to products, written from the product creator's perspective, disregarding the user's needs. Not seeing your product in terms of the benefits it provides is a common problem, even for established businesses. Find out what benefits are important to your customer. Conduct customer interviews. Then test with advertising.

You will always be safe in the world of your customer's (or prospect's) worldview. If your don't frame benefits from the customer's point of view, or you forget to include them, you rapidly become a pest.

The real challenge nowadays lies in pitching your product's benefits without sounding full of hype.

Ah.

Well, I've learned there's always a balance between hype and proof. You can't have too much of one or the other. Too much hype, and you're not credible. Too much proof, and you'll have the charisma of a spreadsheet.

There's a few decent techniques you can use to counterbalance sounding too hypey.

You'll find them in Launch Tomorrow.

It's the only book on the market which deals with landing pages as minimum viable products. Tests.

I'm happy to talk through the bullets in your landing page MVP copy to make them sharp and hype-less. So you convert more leads.

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How To Prove You’re Not “Information Harvesting”

August 14, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Just wanted to privately share some tactics to help you counter Google’s aversion to opt-ins in your landing page MVP. It’s hard enough getting a startup idea off the ground, to have to deal with arbitrary Google Adwords funny business.

If you are using the Launch Tomorrow process, email addresses have always been seen as “currency”. Emails are something valuable a prospect can give you to indicate that they really need the product you want to offer. Moreover, when selling online, you need email opt-ins to establish a relationship. In order to contact your prospect, you need an email address.

Google disagrees–kinda. One of the quickest ways to get on Google’s bad side is what they’ve dubbed “information harvesting”. How’s that for a “made up” problem?

Photo by Robert Wiedemann on Unsplash

Information harvesting means they’re unhappy you’re collecting private emails in exchange for “not enough” in their eyes. They’re chiding you for not providing a good user experience for the Adwords searcher. Yes, of course, but UX is not the point of a landing page collecting opt-ins, now, is it?

Specifically, here’s what Google says they don’t allow:

promotions that prompt users to initiate a purchase, download, or other commitment without first providing all relevant information and obtaining the user’s explicit consent
promotions that represent you, your products, or your services in a way that is not accurate, realistic, and truthful

With information harvesting, Google’s algorithms put you in the same bucket as late-nineties identity thieves. Long lost Nigerian prince relatives. And it’s up to you to prove (to a human employee of theirs) that you aren’t one, assuming you aren’t of course.

That’s what’s so uncomfortable about this policy. Personally, I try to be straight with myself and others as much as I can–all the time. So it feels unpleasant to be guilty until proven innocent. And tedious, to say the least. I do (unfortunately) know from my own experience, as well as other founders’ I’ve worked with.

In practice, though, the information harvester label will stop your landing page MVP in its tracks. Full stop.

Google suspends your entire Adwords account. Ouch.

If that happens, here are a few options:

Drop Google, and move to other traffic sources for your landing page MVP
Ask (without grovelling) GOOG to re-instate your account, and address each of their specific objections head on.
Don’t gather emails, just sell a very low priced product–one which requires email for delivery. At least then you offset the cost of advertising in addition to getting emails.

With respect to dropping Google as a traffic source, it might not be the best source of customers for you in the long term. I’d argue it’s worth haggling with them anyway. You can get a lot of cheap, targeted market research about your value proposition from them–really quickly. They have traffic (ranked #1), and more importantly, they have more searchers than anyone else on the planet. If you want to find prospects searching for a solution to their problem, Google’s hard to beat.

Asking for Google to re-instate your account is a good, albeit slow, option. Typically, the actual changes they require aren’t that big, or at least there are simple workarounds.

For example, if you are asking for an opt-in, you need to be explicit, clear, and logical on exactly why you need their email address. Explain exactly what they should expect. If you are being up-front, transparent, and honest, you’re golden. That tends to help.

You also need to be clear WHERE IT SAYS ENTER EMAIL ADDRESS:

how often you will email them
how to unsubscribe, which google calls an “option to discontinue direct communications”
whether you will pass on user details to other companies.

There are also a few important components which must be on your Google-friendly landing page. This is true for both search and display traffic.

For example, if you have a form on the page, you must also include a privacy policy. Google wants you to be up front about your privacy policy, to openly declare what you’re doing with user data. You can hire a lawyer to draw one up for you, or you can just grab a subscription on iubenda [aff link]. It’s a privacy policy as a SaaS app. Select all of the tools you are actually using on your website, and get a lawyer approved privacy policy in 30 minutes. That’s an easy one. Usually, having a privacy policy increases conversions anyway. They’re possibly doing you a favor.

Other bits you need on your landing page include:

contact details
a phone number, especially, will help

You may need to clarify your business model to Google. You may also need to be transparent, and explain it to your Google sourced visitors. What’s free, what isn’t, and when they can expect to pay for something. Sometimes this can cause difficulties if you are a broker or middleman.

Ultimately, it will always come down to a judgement call by Google staff, so you will always need to comply to their requests. At the same time, they do accept that you’re running a business (or starting one). It’s the question of navigating that fine balance, so that everyone is happy.

The third way to get ditch the “information harvesting” label is quite simple…sell. Don’t just collect info. Sell at a loss if you need to. Sell an ebook for $1. Sell a higher priced service (think concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP) that addresses their problem. You may be able to get away with pre-selling the product.

At that point, you will need the user’s personal details to deliver the product. More importantly, you identify the people who are actively in the market for solutions and willing to pay for them. If you do sell (and collect sensitive information like bank or credit card details), you’ll need to use SSL. Grab a free one over here.

As you can see, you have a couple of options if you get this labelled slapped onto your account. Bing has started doing the same. Rumor has it Facebook is starting to “crack down” on information harvesting.

Want to know more about experimenting with landing pages? You’ll find my book Launch Tomorrow helpful. It goes into depth with everything else you need to think about, when putting up a landing page to test out demand for a new product.

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How Intel wrote a business plan without committing to one

August 7, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Take a look at Intel’s business plan (typos and all), circa 1968:

The company will engage in research, development, adn manufacture, and sales of integrated electronic structures to fulfill the needs of electronic systems manufacturers. This will include thin films, thick films, semiconductor devices, and other solid state components used in hybrid and monolithic integrated structures. A variety of processes will be established, both at a laboratory and at at a production level. These include crystal growth, slicing, lapping, polishing, solid state diffusion, photolithographic masking and etching, vacuum evaporation, film deposition, assembly, packaging, and testing, as well as the development and manufacture of special processing and testing equipment required to carry out these processes. Products may include dioded, transistors, field effect devices, photo sensitive devices, integrated circuits, and subsystems commonly referred to by the phrase “large scale integration”. Principal customers for these products are expected to be the manufacturers of advanced electronic systems for communications, radar, control, and data processing. It is anticipated that many of these customers will be located outside of California. Today, Intel is a multi-billion dollar company. Note that they acknowledge uncertainty, with the word “may”.

To me, it looks as though they intentionally wanted to avoid committing to specific product type, while still ticking the box that they have a business plan. The point of business plans isn’t to have a business plan. It’s to make your assumptions explicit, so that you can test them.

In fact, according to the old Startup Genome report on why startups fail, 70% of startups fail because they try to scale up, without having verified enough of their assumptions.

Best of all, verifying an assumption doesn’t require a full business plan.

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