Tag Archives: awareness

How I Use Those Seven Questions (Or Five of Them, Anyway) With Bredemarket Clients

Bredemarket’s “Seven Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You” provides an ideal framework to launch work on a piece of content.

For one thing, they’re easy to remember: why, how, what, goal, benefits, hungry people (target audience), emotions.

So I use these questions in actual client work.

The seven questions.

Using these questions with a Bredemarket client

Again, this isn’t just ivory tower stuff. I actually USE these questions. Here’s an anonymized example of how I recently used five of these seven questions to launch a new client project.

The questions I asked

  • Why is this document needed?
  • How will this document be used? As a download? As introductory text within proposals? As a demo script, video script, or webinar script?
  • What funnel stage(s) should this document address? Awareness? Consideration? Conversion?
  • As a related question, what is the primary goal of this document?
  • Who should be the target(s) for this document? Decision-makers? Technologists?
  • Approximate document length?

Just between you and me, “approximate document length” is one of the questions I ask AFTER I’ve asked my initial seven questions. I normally don’t talk about my other questions (if I tell you about them I will have to kill you), but they’re there.

The questions I didn’t ask

And no, I felt no driving need to ask about the benefits of the document. The chief benefit is more sales of the product that the document will describe.

And in this case I didn’t ask about emotions. Perhaps I’ll address that once I have a better feel for the document and start writing it.

It’s too early to say how these questions will shape the final content, because I just asked them. But I believe the answers will give me a rapid head start on creating the client’s deliverable.

So what?

But you don’t care about my client (unless you ARE my client and are reading this). You care about YOUR content.

How can my question process help you create stellar content and more sales of YOUR product?

If you want me to annoy YOU with a lot of questions (in the same way that I annoy my existing clients), set up a free meeting.

Invisibility Can Be Bad

If your prospects don’t know who you are, create customer-focused content that explains how your company can solve prospect problems—and increase awareness of the company’s solutions.

Because product invisibility is (usually) bad.

For the longer, more bombastic version of this post, click here.

And to get my help in content creation, click here.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

Bredemarket 2026 Tactical Goals 1 and 2

Long-time Bredemarket fans may recall when Bredemarket established and publicized annual goals. I haven’t publicized my overall goals since 2022, but I am publicizing these two tactical goals for 2026 to (1) hold myself accountable, and to (2) enlist your help. Both are awareness goals, designed to bring Bredemarket to the attention of the identity, biometric, and technology marketing leaders who are my hungry people.

Tactical Goal 1

In calendar year 2026, achieve 100 WordPress views (as measured by “Most Viewed,” not “Most Downloaded”) for each of the three “essentials” videos:

  • Landscape.
  • The Seven Questions I Ask.
  • Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.

For your convenience, you can find and view all three videos at a single Bredemarket blog post “Bredemarket Essentials November 2025.”

Tactical Goal 2

In calendar year 2026, achieve 1,000 YouTube views for each of the same three “essentials” videos.

Again for your convenience, you can find all three videos in this YouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDHu4DNJv1KYQaR9Pvo0z4KzaZZweM02C

How you can help

You can help me realize my goals by doing one or both of the following (I ask, then YOU act):

  • If you have not seen all three of these videos yourself, visit either the Bredemarket blog post or the YouTube playlist and view the ones you haven’t seen. No need to view the ones you’ve already seen; I’m interested in meaningful views, not statistical inflation.
  • Share the videos with identity, biometric, and technology marketing leaders who can use Bredemarket’s services.

For me, 100 or 1,000 annual views of a video is a stretch goal. Even looking at lifetime statistics, my most popular WordPress video, my discovery of the Amazon Fresh Upland opening, has less than 100 views, and my most popular YouTube short, the metal strips that protect palm trees from squirrels, has less than 3,100 views. (I believe my most popular video ever was my Instagram reel of the San Antonio Avenue bridge: over 6,800 views.)

Maybe I should ditch the wildebeests, wombats, and iguanas (and koalas) and concentrate on squirrels. On a bridge. Eating Amazon Fresh groceries.

Google Gemini.

Three Takeaways From Carey Ransom’s Presentation on Banking Technology

Another SoCal Tech Forum presentation on Saturday, this one on banking technology from Carey Ransom of BankTech Ventures.

FoundrSpace.

Only a small reference to financial identity, but excellent nonetheless. While I live-posted the event here on my personal LinkedIn account, I wanted to summarize my three main takeaways from Bredemarket’s perspective.

One: Differentiate

Yes, community banks need to differentiate. Perhaps back in the 1980s before the advent of national banks, community banks could offer a standard suite of services for their communities. But now they’re competing against national banks that do business in their prospects’ communities, and in their prospects’ phones. (We will get to phones in a minute.)

One example Ransom gave: why do community banks offer credit cards? Are their credit cards better than the credit cards from the Really Big (Banking) Bunch? Probably not.

But unlike the Capital Ones and Chimes of the world, community banks know their communities. And they know what local businesses need, and are ideally suited to deliver this. (We will get to services in two minutes.)

Yes, I know that Bank of America may have someone attending and sponsoring your local events, but that person is not Brian Moynihan. And if you don’t know who Moynihan is, your prospects don’t know him either.

Two: Mobilize

Some time ago I wrote a post about shifts in the banking industry, most notably from imposing branch buildings to locations within grocery stores to your mobile phones.

But John, you may be saying to yourself, you can’t bank on a phone. How do you deposit checks? And how do you get cash?

Well, let’s look at this:

  • Bredemarket hasn’t received a check in over three years, but when one of my clients was paying me by check, I would use my phone to take a picture of it and deposit it.
  • And as for cash, this is needed less and less, especially since many merchants take Apple Pay and Google Pay.

In fact, bank branches are so irrelevant to today’s—and tomorrow’s—bank prospects and customers that Ransom referred to a $3 million dollar bank branch as a really expensive billboard. Probably none of the people who are reading this post WANT to go into a bank branch. 

And those that do? Here’s a little secret: if the average age of the people who bank at your bank is in their 70s, they will…um…not be long-term bank customers. The 18 year olds that will bank for decades? They’re opening accounts on their phones. Can they use a phone to open an account at your bank? And why would they do so? (See the differentiation discussion above.)

Three: Supplement

One way a bank can differentiate is via the services they offer.

At the most basic level, a bank can make money by loaning the funds they receive from deposits.

But they can offer many more services to 21st century clients, thanks to legislation such as the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act that allow financial holding companies to own financial or complementary firms.

And not just investments and wealth management.

Ransom provided an illustrative example: cybersecurity.

Banks need to have expertise in cybersecurity to stay alive, and to comply with Know Your Customer and other financial regulations.

So why not offer cybersecurity services to their customers?

This not only gives the banks another revenue stream, but also reduces the risk that their own customers will experience fraud from hacks.

Four: Market

I know I said there were three takeaways. I lied.

Ransom also noted that CapitalOne spends 20% on marketing, including everything from TV ads to cafes. Your typical community bank spends much less, maybe 1%.

How are your prospects going to know what differentiates your bank if they don’t have awareness of those differentiators?

Perhaps you need content such as case studies or white papers. Even blog posts help ensure that your firm comes up in LLM answers. Your prospects aren’t watching ABC, CBS, or NBC commercials.

From NP Digital.

Or perhaps you need proposal or analysis services.

Bredemarket, a provider of content, proposal, and analysis services to technology (and identity) firms, can work with you to create the words you need. Learn about my offerings and book a free meeting here.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

National Kick Butt Day

Tomorrow, the second Monday in October, is National Kick Butt Day.

If there is any goal you want to accomplish, just do it.

Such as an awareness goal.

Or a marketing leader goal to schedule a meeting with Bredemarket: https://bredemarket.com/mark/

Two other holidays are celebrated on Monday, but I won’t wade into that culture war right now.

Do You Understand Your Company’s Negative Reputation?

Marketers are driven to accentuate the positive about their companies. Perhaps the company has a charismatic founder who repeatedly emphasizes how “insanely great” his company is and who talked about “bozos.” (Yeah, there was a guy who did both of those.)

And since marketers are often mandated to create both external and internal sales enablement content, their view of their own company and their own product is colored.

But if you ONLY pay attention to your positive story, you’re half blind.

  • You miss what your competitors are telling their prospects about you.
  • You miss what your departed customers are saying about you.

So ideally you should intentionally (and privately) seek the negative things that are said about your company.

One quick way to do this is to take advantage of answer engine optimization and ask a generative AI search engine what it thinks are the negatives about your company.

(I did this several years ago, when generative AI was in its infancy, and encountered some false statements about a company. So what did I do? Create corrective content that negated these negative statements. But I digress.)

I should demonstrate this with an example. But I shouldn’t ask about any of my former employers or former consulting clients. What’s a safe company that I can research and minimize the trouble I’d get into?

Google Gemini prompt: “What factors contribute to Bredemarket’s negative reputation?”

OK, this may get me in a little trouble, but it could be a lot worse if I targeted a larger company.

Anyway, I fed this prompt to Google Gemini, which identified two factors.

The first factor was “Indirect Backlash from Controversial Blog Content.” Google cited this post as an example, warning that I could get in trouble for expressing a “minority opinion.” That opinion? That changing the name of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) to the Association of Winning Business Professionals (AWBP) was a GOOD thing. As it turn out, the APMP reversed the rebrand, so my opinion was definitely not popular in the long run.

But I’d rather focus on Google’s second factor, which I will reproduce in full.

2. General Reputation Factors (Lack of Public Reviews)

As a small-scale, expert-driven consulting/content service, Bredemarket’s reputation is likely not governed by major public review platforms like Yelp or Google Reviews in the same way a consumer business is. The absence of traditional positive or negative reviews means its reputation is less solidified publicly.

In general, factors that could negatively affect the reputation of any small consulting firm, which may apply to Bredemarket if not explicitly disproven, include:

  • Limited Public Visibility: If the brand is not widely known outside of a niche (proposal writing, identity/biometrics), a lack of positive brand presence can make it appear less credible than larger competitors.
  • Visual or Digital Identity: For a business-to-business (B2B) content provider, a website with a “neglected and too generic visual identity” could potentially undermine professionalism, although no evidence suggests this is the case for Bredemarket specifically.
  • Reliance on a Single Voice: As the service is heavily identified with the founder, John E. Bredehoft, any professional disagreement with his published opinions could be mistakenly interpreted as dissatisfaction with the entire “Bredemarket” service.

As you can see from reading the answer, Google didn’t really know a lot about Bredemarket…because of my LIMITED PUBLIC VISIBILITY.

AI from Google Gemini.

It didn’t really know Bredemarket’s VISUAL OR DIGITAL IDENTITY, and therefore couldn’t evaluate whether my wildebeest-infused graphics made up for the rather generic nature of my website. (Or whether the wildebeests and iguanas and the like are actually a detriment.)

AI from Google Gemini.

As for the last part, RELIANCE ON A SINGLE VOICE (Bredebot doesn’t count), that is pretty much unavoidable.

Conclusion regarding Bredemarket’s negative reputation

So in my analysis of what creates a negative reputation for my own company Bredemarket, the primary issue is my limited public visibility, or as marketers say limited awareness. Or, taking a word I’ve used in other contexts, the market’s indifference toward Bredemarket.

Sure I’m visible in some very specific niches (try an AEO search for “biometric product marketing expert” some time), but it’s not like the entire biometric industry or the entire city of Ontario, California is constantly talking about Bredmarket.

I need to step that awareness up by several orders of magnitude.

AI from Google Gemini.

Preferably not though public nudity. That would not be a positive. (Google Gemini wouldn’t even generate a picture of this, even with strategic placement of the “Bredemarket” sign. Good for them.)

Technology Product Marketing Expert

Are you a technology marketing leader, struggling to market your products to your prospects for maximum awareness, consideration, and conversion?

I’m John E. Bredehoft. For over 30 years, I’ve created strategy and tactics to market technical products for over 20 B2B/B2G companies and consulting clients.

But my past isn’t as important as your present challenges. Let’s talk about your specific needs and how I would approach solving them.

Consulting: Bredemarket at https://bredemarket.com/mark/

Employment: LinkedIn at https://linkedin.com/in/jbredehoft/

Technology product marketing expert.

How to Increase Awareness of Your Company’s Offerings With Blog Posts (A Repurpose)

How can blog posts increase the awareness of your identity/biometric or technology company’s products and services? I’m going to explain how in this blog post. 

By the way, this is a rewrite of my more technical Tuesday blog post “How Can Your Technology Company Increase Product Benefit Awareness Right Now?” Because you can rewrite blog posts when you feel like it.

Why a funnel?

Imagine there’s a funnel. It’s easy if you try. But this funnel doesn’t stream water, but people. (Or wombats.)

The funnel. Imagen 4.

In this funnel, the people (or wombats) who are potentially interested in your offering—your prospects—start at the very top. The few who actually buy your offering emerge from the bottom. 

But how do you get people to enter the funnel and become aware of your offering?

How can blog posts help you?

One great way to let people know about your offering is by blog posts such as this one. 

Blogs are a fast way to tell your prospects how your offering can help them. And you can create blog posts very quickly, within days or even hours. 

If you want to make prospects aware of your company’s service, write a blog post.

What can Bredemarket offer to you?

One of Bredemarket’s offerings is…writing blog posts for other companies. I can help your identity/biometric or technology company write blog posts so you can get more people to learn about your services.

If you want to learn how I can help your company write blog posts, visit bredemarket.com/mark.