Effective product marketing usually won’t help you make your numbers this quarter. But it can provide long-term benefits…if properly executed and maintained.
A Cautionary Tale
In a down employment market such as the one the tech industry is experiencing right now, the common wisdom is that if a company isn’t hiring new employees, it can definitely use independent consultants.
Sometimes the common wisdom is faulty.
One of Bredemarket’s former clients (whom I will not name) illustrates the gaps in the common wisdom. I had worked on projects for this company several times…until I didn’t.
Because of a company reorg, my contact at the company changed, and the new contact sent a project my way.
Halfway through the project I was asked to stop work with no explanation.
When a direct report to my new contact reached out to get to know me, the report assured me that the stop work order had nothing to do with me.
My contract was about to expire, but the direct report said it would probably be renewed. (Admittedly the direct report had no decision-making authority).
A month later, I found myself unable to log in to the company’s contractor website.
I reached out to a third party (not employed by the company) who managed its contractors. The third party confirmed that my contract had not been renewed.
I executed my offboarding process for removing confidential company information and informed my company contact. I received no response. (Not surprising. Many people, rather than delivering or confirming bad news, will say nothing at all—ghosting.)
I subsequently learned that the company was performing multiple rounds of layoffs, in a “the layoffs will continue until morale improves”style.
If Properly Executed
If I had provided said company with top-notch content-proposal-analysis work, would those laid-off people have kept their jobs?
Probably not. Content, proposal, and analysis work is not a quick fix.
The proposal process is only part of a long-term effort, which may start years before a Request for Proposal (RFP) is released, and may not end for years after a proposal is submitted in response to the RFP.
And analysis itself is just the first step in a long process. After you analyze something, you have to decide what to do with the results.
While not a quick fix, doing the work now will benefit the company in the long run. Even in the short term, setting the strategy communicates to everyone, including both internal and external stakeholders, the direction in which your company is heading.
If Properly Maintained
But you can’t just treat this as a one-time oroject and be done with it. Looking at the content portion alone, you have to regularly revisit your content and update it as needed.
This is a trick I learned back in my proposal days. Some of my former employers used proposal management software packages, many of which used a “timeout” feature on standard proposal text that required someone to review the text by a certain date.
Does your proposal text state that your software supports Windows 10? Perhaps it’s a good idea to mention Windows 11 also.
Or you may need to revise your standard proposal text to mention that new feature…or new benefit. Any proposal text for a health application that was written in December 2019 definitely required an update in December 2020.
What this means for your company
If you haven’t laid the groundwork for your company’s product marketing, Bredemarket can help in a variety of ways. After asking questions (starting with “Why?”) about your needs, we can jointly decide on the most critically important things Bredemarket can do for you and your company.
To find out how John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket can serve as your “CPA” (Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional), go to my CPA page.
Postscript
And no, I’m not going to share an Eagles song. I’m going to share a Madness song.
(AI wildebeest “Keep Moving” image from Google Gemini)
So if I want to be like everybody else, I would use ChatGPT just like everybody else does. After all, I am a human and I need to be loved.
But if I were to use ChatGPT regularly, that would require me to create an account.
And I have too many accounts already.
Why not use the credentials of one of my existing accounts for generative AI work?
Not Everybody Uses the STAR Method
And if you want to send a prompt to ChatGPT, ask it to reformat a story based upon the STAR method.
For the few who don’t know what that acronym means, you’re obviously behind the times because everybody uses the STAR method.
The acronym STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. You can apply this in many situations: for example, during a job interview, you could describe one of your past accomplishments using this format.
After all, it only takes four steps.
But what if I can accomplish the same, um, result in THREE steps?
Problem
Solution
Result
That’s the format that Bredemarket used when writing a dozen case studies for an identity/biometric client.
And it worked just fine.
The client’s prospects didn’t stop doing business with the client because it didn’t differentiate between the situation and the task, or the task and the action, or whatever.
The prospects wanted, um, results, not a deep outline.
Not Everybody Fails to Differentiate
I’ve railed about a lack of differentiation before, but for some odd reason the billions of workers in the world don’t listen to me.
But if I were to intentionally adopt a yellow website them and wear retro glasses and sing a lot like Ray of Social’s Georgia Williams, that doesn’t mean that I can achieve the same results that she can.
For one, if you call her to have a natter about your mish, she probably won’t talk about wildebeests at all.
But she’s still doing OK.
You need to adopt your own tone of voice. I was just discussing this with a Bredemarket client regarding a critical piece of content that needs to be in the client’s own voice. Not mine. Not Georgia’s.
So communicate your way, use your preferred generative AI platform, and use your preferred storytelling method.
Have you ever been told to do something because one of your competitors does it?
Or have you ever been told to do something because it worked for an expert?
(A little secret: it didn’t work for the expert either. If it did, the expert would be like Myspace Tom and retire completely, rather than hawking The Expert Method of Success in Whatever.)
You be you. And the people who feel like you do will gravitate to you.
The most profitable decisions I’ve made came from trusting my instincts….
Every time, someone with more success than me said I was wrong. And every time, my intuition ended up being right. Not because I’m the smartest person in the world. I’m not. My intuition is right because I know what works best for me.
We each have a way we want to conduct business (and life). The way that someone else conducts business is literally alien to us. I couldn’t be Larry Ellison if I tried…and Larry Ellison couldn’t be me.
I (usually) trust myself
As an example, take the title of my blog post “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and how wrong it is.
Let’s start with the first thing I did wrong: I referred to a song title that many of you don’t recognize.
Now the second thing I did wrong: The reason you don’t recognize the song title is because the song in question is a half-century old. In a world where people discount work that relies on sources predating 2000, this is a fatal move.
And number four takes the cake. I’m illustrating this piece with a CURRENT picture of Frampton, in which he looks decidedly different when he said…whatever he said on his talk box.
Some time ago I read a story (which may or may not have been true) about an employer who called multiple job applicants to the office for a morning interview. As time passed and the employer didn’t interview anyone, some of the applicants got tired of waiting and left. At the end of the day, only one applicant remained. That applicant got the job.
The person who told the story thought that it demonstrated that perseverance pays off.
Most of the readers thought that it demonstrated that the employer was a jerk and that the work environment was probably toxic.
If this were to happen in real life, the employer would paradoxically lose out on the BEST candidates who had better things to do than sit around an office all day.
Why?
Because people avoid friction. If job applicants can obtain jobs without playing silly games, they will.
When I started in the biometric industry 30 years ago, many police agencies were capturing fingerprints by putting ink on a person’s fingers and rolling/slapping the prints on a card.
That was messy and time-consuming, so companies like Digital Biometrics and Identix developed “livescan” devices, which did not require ANY ink and which let police agencies capture fingerprints by rolling/slapping the prints on a glass platen. This process could require a minute or two for the livescan operator to capture all fourteen images.
That’s a long time.
As I’ve previously noted, it was TOO long for some people in the federal government, who began asking in 2004 if technology could capture a complete set of fingerprints in 15 seconds.
20 years later, we can capture fingerprints (at least 8 of them) in a couple of seconds.
How?
By avoiding friction. Rather than forcing people to place their fingerprints on a card or a platen, “contactless” technology lets the “wave” (or “fly”) their fingers over a capture device, or hold their fingerprints in front of a smartphone camera.
When a prospect wants to find out about your biometric solution, how does silence help you?
Let’s say that a prospect hears that MegaCorp offers a biometric solution, but MegaCorp’s blog and social media haven’t posted anything lately.
What are the chances that the prospect will search far and wide to find out about MegaCorp’s biometric solution?
Actually, the chances are better that the prospect won’t search at all, and will turn to the competitors who are NOT silent.
Are you going to look for the information that is easily available, or the information that is hard to obtain?
Friction is bad.
Eating my own wildebeest food
I’m trying to reduce friction in Bredemarket’s own practices.
While I still use landing pages for some thing that require further explanation for some prospects, I’m trying to avoid them in some instances.
I’m working on a marketing campaign for a client, and my first “draft 0.5” of the campaign was loaded with friction.
The prospect had to open an email.
In the email, the prospect had to click on a landing page.
On the landing page, the prospect had to fill out a form to book a meeting.
Huge numbers of people drop out of the process at every step. So why not eliminate a step, and let the prospect book a meeting in a form embedded in the email?
Friction is bad.
And I’m applying this same principle to this post.
If your identity/biometric firm is desperate for content to convert prospects into paying customers, why don’t you schedule a free 30-minute meeting with Bredemarket to discuss your needs and what I can offer?
Incidentally, while I often repurpose blog content on Bredemarket’s social media channels, this post WON’T be one of them. I can’t embed a Calendly form into an Instagram or LinkedIn post.
Whether and how you delegate something depends upon its importance, especially if you recognize three levels of importance. Sometimes the very important and critically important items require a CPA, or Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional. (I know one.)
When you have a single level of importance, then decisions are pretty simple. For urgent things, do it yourself if it’s important, delegate it if it’s not.
When “importance” is more granular
But what if, instead of “Not Important” and “Important,” we had three levels of importance instead of just one? In other words, “Not Important,” “Important,” “Very Important,” and “Critically Important”?
A U.S. Navy plane flying over a Soviet ship in October 1962 is, um, classified as “Critically Important.” Oh, and it’s urgent. By USN – Dictionary of American Naval Aviation Squadrons Volume 2: The History of VP, VPB, VP(H) and VP(AM) Squadrons [4], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7328539.
In that case, you not only consider whether to delegate something, but who should be delegated that thing. (Or, as you’ll see, WHAT should be delegated that thing.)
If the need is not important, delegate it, but it doesn’t really matter to whom or what you delegate it. ChatGPT or Bard is “good enough,” even if the result is awful.
If the need is important, delegate it to someone you trust to create very good content. Let them create the content, you approve it, and you’re done.
If the need is very important, then you may delegate some of the work, but you don’t want to delegate all of it. You need to be involved in the content creation process from the initial meeting, through the review of every draft, and of course for the final approval. The goal is stellar content.
If the need is critically important, then you probably don’t want to delegate the work and will want to do it yourself—unless you can find someone who is better than you in creating content.
As I noted in October, a more granular approach to importance increases the, um, importance of Bredemarket’s services.
In the simple Eisenhower Matrix model, Bredemarket handles the Not Important stuff while you handle the Important stuff.
In the “three levels of importance” model, Bredemarket handles the Very Important and Critically Important stuff. Because the merely Important stuff and the Not Important stuff doesn’t require my 30 years of technology, identity, and biometrics expertise.
Sometimes you need a CPA (but NOT a Certified Public Accountant)
But if your needs are critical, and you require the services of a CPA (Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional), then you need to learn what Bredemarket can do for you. Click on the image to learn more.
The word “landscape” suggests a physical environment, not a digital environment. Merriam-Webster specifically cites “natural inland scenery,” which even rules out the shoreline, much less a bunch of smartphone apps or SDKs jumbled together.
And how does a DIGITAL landscape evolve, rapidly or otherwise?
Now I’m not suggesting that you AVOID references to the “rapidly evolving digital landscape.” After all, if aspiring influencers and thought leaders use the term, your content needs to sound exactly like theirs. And this applies whether your thought leader is a person or an AI bot. Trust me on this.
Or perhaps you shouldn’t take my advice. Maybe the overuse of hack phrases is NOT a best-of-breed approach.
So why did I write this…
Because a particular respectable vendor began a Facebook post with the words “In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.”
And it shook me.
Was this a one-time slip up, or are readers EXPECTING companies to talk like this?
(Digital landscape image AI-generated by Google Gemini)
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