awareness – Page 2 – Bredemarket

How Can Your Technology Company Increase Product Benefit Awareness Right Now?

(Imagen 4.)

Do your technology company’s prospects know about you?

How can your technology company increase product benefit awareness right now?

(“Right Now” is a song. Keep tuned for another song reference.)

Before showing you how to do this, let’s take a closer look at three words in the title: product, benefit, and awareness.

Then we’ll get into the how: have, know, write, and publish.

And one more “how” if blogging is hard.

Three words break the code of indifference

No apologies for the section heading, but since her dad died, Kelly Osbourne’s best song (albeit with a curious history) has been on my mind.

While Osbourne’s one word breaks the code of silence, the three words that I chose for my post title break the code of indifference. And I chose each of them—product, benefit, and awareness—carefully.

Word One: Product

Companies talk about a lot of things. Their “why” story. Their great place to work award. Their social/moral/ethical conscience.

Right now I don’t care about any of that. I care about the company’s products or services: the way they make money.

Because if prospects don’t buy these products and become customers, then their why story and awards and conscience count for zilch. There’s a time to share those stories, but for now let’s focus on the product story.

Word Two: Benefit

Now once you look at those products, they have a bunch of features. The ability to capture fingerprints at 1,000 pixels per inch. The ability to complete a third-party risk management analysis in hours, not months. The ability to deliver a completely vetted blog post in days, not weeks.

Right now I don’t care about any of that. I care about the benefits the product brings to the prospect: the things that will make them become a customer.

Revenue is definitely beneficial. Imagen 4.

Because prospects don’t care about you; they only care about themselves. And if your product doesn’t provide tangible benefits to them, they’ll ignore it.

Word Three: Awareness

The third word differs from the other two, because there are multiple answers that are equally valid. I’ve just chosen to focus on one. If you subscribe to the notion of an ordered funnel (some marketers instead believe in a messy middle), then all prospects enter at the beginning of the funnel, and a subset of those prospects exit as buying customers at the end of the funnel. Using a simple three-stage funnel model, you can define those three stages as awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Right now I don’t care about consideration or conversion, although they’re obviously important. (If you have no conversions, you have no revenue, and you have no company.) For my purposes I’m focusing on awareness, or the stage in which a prospect discovers that your company has a product or service that benefits them.

So how can you raise awareness of the benefits of your product to your prospects? There are multiple methods: text, images, videos, quizzes, contests, webinars, and podcasts. Bredemarket uses many of these methods via its social media channels. But today I’m going to focus on one particular method: blog posts. But we’ll cover some of the other ones also.

One blog breaks the lack of knowledge

The reason that I’m so gung-ho about blog posts is that they can be created and distributed very quickly. Press releases can take a long time. Videos, even longer. Webinars, even longer still.

Compare that to a blog post. A sole proprietor can generate a blog post in an hour. A company can get an emergency blog post out in the same time, provided the right people are in the room.

But before you can wow the world with your product’s benefits to your prospects, you have to go through several steps. The four steps listed here (have, know, write, and publish) are somewhat, but they paint the broad brush strokes.

Step One: Have a blog site (or equivalent)

This sounds obvious, but if you don’t have a blog site, you can’t post a blog.

Using myself as an example, my Bredemarket website is hosted by WordPress. And the website has an area where I’ve filed over a thousand blog posts, including this one.

From https://www.facebook.com/Bredemarket/.

What if you don’t have a blog, or even a website? Create a LinkedIn business page or a Facebook business page or something similar and start writing there.

Step Two: Know what you’re going to say, and why you’re saying it (I ask…)

I could spend ten blog posts talking about this step alone. It’s a loaded step encompassing both strategic and tactical elements. Vision. Mission. Positioning and messaging. And finally, the topic that you want to address in this single blog post.

For now I’ll just say that you should take a deep breath before putting pen to paper (or keyboard to file).

I ask. (Here are some good questions to ask before you write something.)

Step Three: Write and rewrite what you want to say (…then I act)

I ask, then I act.

But I act iteratively.

In most cases, I don’t just write and post.

I often create what I call a “draft 0.5,” where I get my ideas down, sleep on them, and then take a fresh second look. Often during that second look I cut out half the text.
When working on a project for a Bredemarket client, the text bounces between me and the client. I’ll write the first draft, then the client will review it and offer suggestions, and then I’ll rewrite it. For shorter text I’ll usually have two review cycles, with three review cycles for longer text.

The important thing is to get the piece written, reviewed, and approved. While I’ve drafted pieces and sat on them for months, the true benefits of blogging occur when you publish the piece as soon as possible.

Step four: Publish and publicize

When you’re ready, publish the blog post.

Perhaps you want to schedule the post to appear at an optimum time. For example, I am typing these words (or draft 0.5 of them anyway) on Sunday afternoon, knowing full well I won’t post this on Sunday afternoon. I’m thinking Tuesday morning.
And maybe there’s a reason why you want to publish a post at a particular time. If a trade show begins on Monday September 15, you may want to publish the promotional blog post on Friday September 12.

Once you’ve posted, publicize it.

If your company has an array of social media channels, you have two choices. Either you can post a link to the blog post on the social channel, or you can encapsulate the message from the blog post and repurpose it for the social channel without linking externally. Whatever gets the message out.
Taking an example from myself, I created a video entitled “Landscape (Biometric Product Marketing Expert)” on Sunday morning. I shared this video in a blog post. I also shared it in social media posts on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube. The only current social channels where I didn’t share it were Flip (because it’s…landscape). If I wanted to, I could have assembled a video or created a podcast or hosted a webinar. Oh, and I’m sharing it again. (Right now.)

Landscape (Biometric Product Marketing Expert).

Depending upon your thinking time, your drafting time, and your review cycles, you can get your message out to your prospects within a week…or even within a day.

Not too bad.

But I can’t do all that!

For some people, the idea of writing a blog post can be overwhelming.

That’s why Bredemarket is here to help you increase your tech company’s product benefit awareness. (Right now.)

If you have a blog site (or a LinkedIn, Facebook, or other equivalent) and are ready to get your message out, let’s talk about next steps.

Content For Tech Marketers. Visit https://bredemarket.com/mark/.

Painting a Picture: The Content Challenges of a Biometric Chief Marketing Officer

(Imagen 4)

If this reads odd, there’s a reason.

Imagine a Chief Marketing Officer sitting at her desk, wondering how she can overcome her latest challenge within three weeks.

She is a CMO at a biometric software company, and she needs someone to write the first two entries in a projected series of blog posts about the company’s chief software product. The posts need to build awareness, and need to appeal to prospects with some biometric knowledge.

So she contacts the biometric product marketing expert, John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket, via his meeting request form, and schedules a Google Meet for the following meeting.

At the scheduled time she joins the meeting from her laptop on her office desk and sees John on the screen. John is a middle-aged Caucasian man with graying hair. He is wearing wire-rimmed glasses with a double bridge. He has a broad smile, with visible lines around his eyes and mouth. His eyes are brown and appear to be looking directly at the camera. He is wearing a dark blue collared shirt. While his background is blurred, he appears to be in a room inside his home, with a bookcase and craft materials in the background.

After some pleasantries and some identity industry chit chat, John started asking some questions. Why? How? What? Goal? Benefits? Target audience (which he called hungry people)? Emotions? Plus some other questions.

They discussed some ideas for the first two blog posts, each of which would be about 500 words long and each of which would cost $500 each. John pledged to provide the first draft of the first post within three calendar days.

After the call, the CMO had a good feeling. John knew biometrics, knew blogging, and had some good ideas about how to raise the company’s awareness. She couldn’t wait to read Bredemarket’s first draft.

If you are in the same situation as the CMO is this story, schedule your own meeting with Bredemarket by visiting the https://bredemarket.com/mark/ URL and filling out the Calendly form.

Remember how I warned you that this post was going to read odd? In case you’re wondering about the unusual phrasing—including a detailed description of what I look like—it’s because I fed the entire text of this blog post to Google Gemini. Preceded by the words “Draw a realistic picture of.” And here’s what I got.

Imagen 4. I’m not on the screen, but I like the content ideas.

Imagen 4. With the bookcases. And I’ve never had a beard.

Stealing and Awareness

The reason that I redirected the purpose of my Substack posts is because much of my audience there isn’t familiar with the…um…minutiae of biometrics and identity. (For example, my reference to minutiae would probably go right past all but two of my Substack subscribers.)

My Substack audience is best served with awareness content.

But awareness content is not only informative and educational.

Awareness of you

It also makes prospects aware of your company…which is critically important.

Last month I said the following about awareness:

“Technology marketers, do your prospects know who you are?

“If they don’t, then your competitors are taking your rightful revenue.

“Don’t let your competitors steal your money.”

Perhaps steal is a harsh word, but it’s accurate.

Or perhaps a better word is indifference: your actions indicate that you don’t care whether customers buy from you or not. If you cared, you’d actually market your products.

Who needs marketing?

“Nonsense, John! We have a sales staff. Who needs marketers?”

Especially when content marketing may take up to 17 months to convert. That doesn’t help the current quarter.

But your sales staff cannot be everywhere. If your prospects don’t know about you and aren’t reaching out to you, then you have to reach out to them.

And the calls? “Hi, I’m Tom with WidgetCorp.” “With who?”

So how is that current quarter looking now?

You need marketing, now

Your current quarter and future quarters would look better if your secret salesperson were working for you. As Rhonda Salvestrini said:

“Content for your business is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic. It’s your secret salesperson because it’s out there working for you 24/7.”

But the secret salesperson won’t engage your prospects until you act to create that content.

Talk to Bredemarket about your content, proposal, and analysis needs: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/

Before your competitors steal more from you.

How Do You Maximize Impact For the RIGHT Awareness?

It’s not enough for your company’s prospects to know who you are, but it helps. But you can do more than that…with Bredemarket’s help.

Who are you?

I just searched for the leading software providers in a particular category. This isn’t unusual. If someone wants to purchase software, they will often conduct their own research before letting themselves be pestered by salespeople.

My category search turned up several software packages.

It DIDN’T turn up numerous others in that category.

So a whole bunch of companies are already at a disadvantage, and there’s a good chance that their competitors are going to take their money because the software buyer won’t even think of purchasing from them.

The software buyer has no AWARENESS of these other software packages.

The Bredemarket website has an entire page on awareness, in which I make the following point:

“Two discussions of this three-step sales funnel are provided by Venn Marketing and Walker Sands (the latter of whom throws in things that happen AFTER the purchase, engagement and advocacy).

“Both sources define awareness as the first step in the funnel, and its purpose is to (drumroll) simply make prospects, um, aware that you and your product/service exist.”

Obviously there are other things you need to do to end up with a happy customer, but you’ll never get a happy customer if it doesn’t even know about you during the prospect stage.

Awareness of what?

Now there are all sorts of ways to raise awareness, but some are better than others.

I previously linked to the story of Beatrice’s rise and fall, in which the fall was illustrated by the infamous “We’re Beatrice” campaign. The tagline? “We’re Beatrice.” What did the tagline mean to prospects? Absolutely nothing.
I knew of another company that was slightly more successful, but not much. Instead of saying “We’re (COMPANY NAME),” they loudly proclaimed “We’re a Unicorn.” This was back during one of the periods of heated market acquisitions. But what difference did the company’s unicorn status mean for its prospects? Not much. If you’ve raised a billion dollars, I only care if you promise to give me a couple of million of it.
Here in Southern California, Honda car dealers have banded together to produce ads about the “helpful Honda people.” Unfortunately, the ads have nothing to do with cars, the products these commercials are supposed to be selling. What difference does a Honda dealer’s helpfulness make? Unless your cat is stuck in a tree, not much.

It’s not enough for your company’s prospects to have awareness about you. They need to have awareness about how you can solve their problems.

Only then will you make an impact.

Raising awareness

Perhaps your company needs to raise awareness of your solutions to your prospects’ problems.

Bredemarket can work with you on this, asking questions and even engaging in…um…WOMBAT to produce impactful content for your company and its products and services.

So that your prospects know about you.

Then we can work on the next steps, consideration and conversation.

Book a free appointment to talk to me: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/

(All pictures from Imagen 3)

Are Your Competitors Stealing From You? The Ultimate Guide to Increasing Prospect Awareness

Technology marketers, do your prospects know who you are?

If they don’t, then your competitors are taking your rightful revenue.

Don’t let your competitors steal your money.

Before I tell you how Bredemarket can solve your technology company’s awareness problem, let me spill the secret of why I’m asking the question in the first place.

The wildebeest’s friend

Normally I don’t let non-person entities write Bredemarket content, but today I’m making an exception.

My usual generative AI tool is Google Gemini, so I sent this prompt:

“What are the five most important types of marketing content to create for a technology software company?”

A little secret: if you want generative AI to supply you with 3 things, ask for more than that. Some of the responses will suck, but maybe the related ones are insightful.

In this case I only wanted ONE type of marketing content, but I reserve the right to “co-author” four more posts based upon the other responses.

Of the 5 responses from Google Gemini, this was the first:

“In-depth Problem-Solving Content (Think Blog Posts, White Papers, Ebooks): Your potential customers are likely facing specific challenges. Content that dives deep into those problems and offers insightful solutions (even if it doesn’t directly pitch your product) builds trust and positions you as a thought leader. Think “The Ultimate Guide to [Industry Challenge]” or a white paper on “Navigating [Complex Technical Issue].””

Now you see where I got the idea for the title of this post. Normally I shy away from bombastic words like “ultimate,” but this sage is going a little wild.

So the bot tells me that the most important type of marketing content for a technology software company is short-form or long-form problem-solving content.

Going meta

Let’s get a little meta (small m) here.

If your prospects don’t know who you are, create customer-focused content that explains how your company can solve their problems.

Now let’s get meta meta.

If you need help creating this content, whether it’s blog posts, articles, white papers, case studies, proposals, or something else, Bredemarket can help you solve your problem.

Let’s talk about your problem and how we can work together to solve it. Book a free meeting via the https://bredemarket.com/cpa/ URL.

(All AI illustrations from Imagen 3 via Google Gemini, of course)

725

While updating my resume today, I discovered that I have now written over 700 blog posts on the Bredemarket site alone. This is number 725, in case you’re keeping score.

And that doesn’t count the myriad of blog posts I’ve written for consulting clients or employers, plus the posts I’ve written for other blogs over the years dating back to 2003.

So in case you’re wondering: yes, I’ve written blog posts before.

And I can augment your company’s resources by writing blog posts (for example, via the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service) that drive awareness, consideration, and/or conversion.

Talk to me about your needs.

(Town crier image Public Domain)

Identity/Biometric Professionals, Does Your Company Need the Right Words?

Identity/biometric professionals require the right words to raise product awareness, influence consideration, or drive conversions.

Bredemarket helps you create the words your prospects and customers must hear now:

Short-length text such as blog posts.
Medium-length text such as white papers.
Longer text such as analyses and proposals.
Retainer arrangements.

With over 29 years of identity/biometric experience, John Bredehoft of Bredemarket is the biometric product marketing expert that can move your company forward.

If I can help you, book a free 30 minute meeting with me on Calendly.

If you’re not sure about using Bredemarket, here is more information.

Identity professionals…

21st/20th Century Lead Gathering

A client is attending an in-person event and asked for advice on how to collect prospect leads at the event. (For awareness.)

Since I practice a mix of old school and new-school technologies, I’m suggesting the following:

Create a landing page for the event with a form to collect the prospect’s name, email, and other essential information, and feed those names into the client’s customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Create a printed sheet with a QR code leading to the landing page, have the prospect point their camera to the QR code, and then the prospect can enter their information directly from their phone.

There are many other ways to collect information, including specialized software and (really old school) business cards, but this way will work.

I wanted to demonstrate how to do this, but Bredemarket doesn’t have any in-person events on its calendar, and I don’t ask my prospects to sign up for my CRM.

But I DO ask my prospects to sign up for my mailing list.

So I created the form below.

Print it out and give it to your friends.

Subscribe to the Bredemarket Mailing List (April 6, 2024)Download

(Pizza Stories) Is Your Firm Hungry for Awareness?

Leftover pizza is the best pizza. Preparation credit: Pizza N Such, Claremont, California. Can I earn free pizza as a powerful influencer? Probably not, but I’ll disclose on the 0.00001% chance that I do.

I wrote a post about pizza that concluded as follows:

Tal’s lead was hungry for ghostwriting services, and when they saw that Tal offered such a service, they contacted him.

What does this mean? I’ll go into that in a separate post.
From (Pizza Stories) The Worst Time to READ a Pizza Post on Social Media.

Now that it’s time to write the “separate post,” I really don’t want to get into the mechanics of how posts that attract prospects (hungry people, target audience) increase awareness and help you convert prospects for your products and services.

So forget that. I’m going to tell a story instead about two executives at a fictional company that has a real problem. The executives’ names are Jones and Smith.

The story

Jones was troubled. Sales weren’t increasing, prospects weren’t appearing, and if this malaise continued the company would have to conduct a second round of layoffs. Jones knew that “rightsizing” would be disastrous, so the company needed another solution.

So Jones videoconferenced Smith and asked, “How can we make 2024 better than 2023?”

Smith replied, “Increasing sales calls could help, and ads could help, but there’s another way to increase our awareness with our prospects. We could create content on our website and on our social channels that spreads knowledge of our products and services.”

Jones exclaimed, “That’s great! We could get generative AI to create content for us!”

“No, not that!” Smith replied. “Generative AI text sounds like a bot wrote it, and makes us sound boring, just like everyone else using generative AI text. Do we want to sound like that and put our prospects to sleep?”

By Ilya Repin – Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60387757

“So we need a human writer,” Jones realized, “one who can describe all of the features of our products.”

“Absolutely not,” Smith emphasized. “Customers don’t care about our features. They care about the benefits we can provide to them. If we just list a bunch of features, they’ll say, ‘So what?'”

By Mindaugas Danys from Vilnius, Lithuania, Lithuania – scream and shout, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44907034

“OK, we’ll go with benefits,” said Jones. “But why is content so important?”

“Take blogging,” replied Smith. “The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those who do not. Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. And 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.”

Data source: Daily Infographic, https://www.dailyinfographic.com/state-of-blogging-industry

“Wow.” Jones was silent for a moment. “How do you know all of this stuff, Smith?”

“Because of the content that I’ve read online from a marketing and writing services company called Bredemarket. The company creates content to urge others to create content. Bredemarket eats its own wildebeest food.”

“Wildebeest?” Jones eyed Smith quizzically.

Black wildebeest. By derekkeats – Flickr: IMG_4955_facebook, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14620744

“Never mind. The important thing is that Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services could help us increase awareness, and vault us over the companies that have blogs but don’t bother to post to them. In one industry, about one-third of the companies with blogs HAVEN’T SAID A SINGLE THING to their prospects and customers in the last two months. If we were in that industry, we could leapfrog over the silent companies.”

By Lorelei7, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3164780

“That sounds great,” said Jones. “Let’s contact Bredemarket today.”

“Wonderful idea, Jones. By the way, I hear that Bredemarket excels at repurposing content also.”

The excited Jones asked Smith to contact Bredemarket, and then walked to a nearby venue and sang a song.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifhcWeXIOZs

(Pizza Stories) The Worst Time to READ a Pizza Post on Social Media

Have you ever seen those posts from self-appointed gurus?

Specifically, the ones that authoritatively state the BEST time to WRITE a post on Instagram, or LinkedIn, or TikTok, or whatever?

I religiously ignore those posts for a simple reason: My country has multiple time zones. So the best time in one time zone may be the worst time in another time zone.

However, I can tell you the WORST time to READ a post in the PACIFIC Time Zone…if the post concerns pizza.

And I’ll explain what all this means…eventually.

Ophir Tal on awareness

In addition to saying WHEN to post, the gurus also provide authoritative (and often contradictory) advice about WHAT to post.

For example, some gurus assert that you MUST prioritize bottom of funnel (conversion) content over top of funnel (awareness) content because it’s most important to get people to buy.

Ophir Tal disagrees, and has evidence to support his position.

Ophir Tal on pizza

From https://www.linkedin.com/in/ophir-tal/.

Ophir Tal self-identifies as a “LinkedIn Ghostwriter & Personal brand Builder for CEOs & Founders”…and part of the way he builds personal brands is via awareness. Here’s where Tal made this assertion about the importance of awareness.

Let’s look at Tal’s hook:

How I Got An Inbound Lead From A Post About Pizza
From Ophir Tal on LinkedIn.

This hook caught my attention. People want leads, and people like pizza, so I paid attention. But I also paid attention for a third reason that I’ll discuss later.

Tal describes how he wrote a LinkedIn post about a piece of pizza that he dropped by mistake, and how he acquired 9,400 views, 97 likes, and 112 comments from that single post. So he told the story a second time.

Tal then noted that the gurus would have recommended NOT posting this because he was “doing it wrong.” Specifically:

The post didn’t solve a problem for his potential clients. (Unless they regularly drop slices of pizza, I guess.)
It didn’t have a strong call to action.
It wasn’t targeted to his ideal clients. (Again, unless they regularly drop slices of pizza, or unless they love chicken wings.)

But despite doing everything wrong, that particular piece of content attracted the attention of someone “at a 6 figure ecom company.” After viewing the content, the reader looked at Tal’s profile and realized Tal could meet their need for ghostwriting services.

Tal earned a lead from his pizza post.

Again, this is only part of Tal’s story. I encourage you to read the rest here.

And now I’ll tell you the third reason why I paid attention to Tal’s post.

John Bredehoft on birthdays

As I noted above, I paid attention to Ophir Tal’s pizza post for two reasons:

People want leads.
People like pizza.

Now let’s jump back to a post I wrote all the way back in 2023, one that described why I’ve soured on the term “target audience.” (Or, in Tal’s words, “ideal clients.”) I started that post by wondering if the term “needy people” would be better than “target audience.” Yes, but not good enough.

I’ll grant that “needy people” has a negative connotation, like the person who is sad when people forget their birthday.
From “I’m Questioning Everything About Target Audiences, Including the Name.”

Why did I include that sentence?

I’ll let you in on a personal secret. When I wrote that, I was myself sad because a few people had forgotten my birthday.

Teddy alone at his pizza birthday party in 2018. Picture shared by Nick VinZant. Story here.

It turns out that these people had a VERY GOOD reason for forgetting my birthday. However, I cannot reveal this reason to you because the disclosure would force me to reveal someone’s personal identifiable information, or PII. (Mine.)

So after they remembered my birthday, one of them asked what I did for my birthday…and I told them that my wife, father-in-law, and brother-in-law went out to dinner.

For pizza.

And I also told them that there were leftovers, which my wife and I enjoyed a few days later.

A nice story, and while I was reading Ophir Tal’s story on dropped pizza, I realized that I had missed an opportunity to tell my own story about leftover pizza.

Time to channel Steve Jobs…

Oh, and there’s one more thing

I forgot to mention one thing about the Ophir Tal story.

When I read the story, it was around 4:00 pm in California.

So when I read about Tal’s dropped pizza, and thought about my leftover pizza (which I had already eaten)…I was hungry.

Target audience, needy people…hungry people

Coincidentally, “hungry people” is the phrase that I eventually decided was better than “needy people.”

Tal’s lead was hungry for ghostwriting services, and when they saw that Tal offered such a service, they contacted him.

What does this mean? I’ll go into that in a separate post.

But for now, remember that stories that raise awareness with your “hungry people” (target audience) are good stories to tell.

Maybe I should tell more stories.