As an identity/biometric blog expert knows, superior identity blog post writing requires specification of benefits and maintenance of customer focus.
3am Thoughts, Saturday, August 12, 2023
Tag Archives: customer focus
No, I Don’t Need Two Refrigerators
In some cases, a customer’s purchase of a particular product or service indicates possible future interest in that same product or service.
But this indicator only goes so far.
If you just purchased an expensive item such as a refrigerator or a car or a house, chances are you’re not in the market for a second refrigerator or car or house.
But some companies don’t understand that high priced items are not usually purchased in bulk. According to a parcelLabs emotional shipping experience study:
People have lost patience with brands who send incorrect or inaccurate marketing materials. In fact, brands that do this are driving their customers away.
Of the 49% that say they were incorrectly targeted to in the last six months, 42% said they immediately unsubscribed from the brand’s marketing content. Another 24% chose to block the brand on social media!
43% said that they received marketing for a product they’d already bought.
You have to be more intelligent in your customer focus. Once a customer has purchased an item, they may—or may not—need a second one. In a different context, I have referred to this as “somewhat you why,” or the need to understand the intent of what someone is doing.
If I’m standing outside my former employer’s office with some computer equipment, perhaps I’m returning equipment to my former employer.
If I’m purchasing a refrigerator, in most cases I’m not contemplating purchase of a second one immediately.
Although if I’m opening a chain of restaurants…
Is the Funnel Consideration Phase Quantitative or Qualitative?
The picture above shows a simple sales funnel example. The second of the three items in the funnel is the “consideration” phase.
- In that phase, those people who are aware of you can then consider your products and services.
- If they like what they see, they move on to conversion and hopefully buy your products and services.
But how do prospects in the funnel consideration phase evaluate your offering as opposed to competitor offerings? Is it truly a quantitative and logical process, or is it in reality qualitative and emotional?
Quantitative consideration
For purposes of this post, let’s assume that there are two competing companies, Bredemarket and Debamarket, who are fighting each other for business.
Second, let’s assume that Bredemarket and Debamarket offer similar services to their prospects and customers:
- Blog posts
- Case studies
- White papers
Finally, let’s assume that a big government agency (the BGA) has issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for blog/case study/white paper services, and Bredemarket and Debamarket are the two companies competing for the award.
Source selection
Now I’m not a big-time pre-acquisition consultant like Applied Forensic Services, but I’ve been around long enough to know how pre-acquisition consultants work—especially when working with big government agencies like BGA.
A pre-acquisition consultant will develop a Source Selection Plan (SSP). In competitive procurements such as the one in this example, the SSP will state exactly how proposals will be evaluated, and how the best proposal will be selected.
SSPs can be very complex for certain opportunities, and not so complex for others. In all cases, the SSP dictates the evaluation criteria used to select the best vendor.
Michael Ropp of RFP360 has published a very simple example of how a particular group of proposal responses may be evaluated.
The weighted scoring approach breaks down your RFP evaluation criteria and assigns a value to each question or section. For example, your RFP criteria may consider questions of technical expertise, capabilities, data security, HR policies and diversity and sustainability. Weighted scoring prioritizes the criteria that are most important to your business by assigning them a point or percentage value. So your weighted scoring criteria may look like this:
RFP360, “A guide to RFP evaluation criteria: Basics, tips and examples.” (Link)
- Technical expertise – 25%
- Capabilities – 40%
- Data security – 10%
- HR policies – 10%
- Diversity and sustainability – 15%
Individual question evaluation
In most cases the evaluator doesn’t look at the entire technical expertise section and give it a single score. In large RFPs, the technical expertise section may consist of 96 questions (or even 960 questions), each of which is evaluated and fed into the total technical expertise score.
For example, the RFP may include a question such as this one, and the responses from the bidders (Bredemarket and Debamarket) are evaluated.
| Question | Bredemarket | Debamarket |
| 96. The completed blog post shall include no references to 1960s songs. | 0.8 points awarded. While many Bredemarket blog posts comply, “How Remote Work Preserves Your Brain” does not. | 1.0 points awarded. Debamarket fully complies. |
Final quantitative recommendation for award
Now repeat this evaluation method for every RFP question in every RFP category and you end up with a report in which one of the vendors receives more points than the other and is clearly the preferred bidder. Here’s an example from a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposal source selection process. (And you can bet that a nuclear agency doesn’t use an evaluation method that is, um, haphazard.)
PROPOSALS SUBMITTED UNDER RFP NO. RQ-CIO-01-0290
ENTITLED, “INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES AND SUPPORT
CONTRACT (ISSC).”” (link)
So what does this example show us? It shows that L-3 Communications/EER received a total score of 83.8, while its closest competitor Logicon only received a score of 80. So EER is the preferred bidder.
So in our example, BGA would evaluate Bredemarket and Debamarket, come up with a number for each bidder, and award the contract to the bidder with the highest evaluation score.
Quantitative recommendation for the little guys
Perhaps people who aren’t big government agencies don’t go to this level of detail, but many prospects who reach the consideration phase use some type of quantitative method.
For example, if the (non-weighted) pros for an item under consideration outnumber the cons, go for it.
Five pros and only three cons. Do it!
All quantative, objective, and straightforward.
If people really evaluate that way.
But is consideration quantitative?
Now of course the discussion above assumes that everyone is a logical being who solely evaluates based on objective criteria.
But even Sages such as myself may deviate from the objective norm. Here’s a story of one time when I did just that.
As I previously mentioned, I had never written a proposal response before I started consulting for Printrak. But I had written a Request for Proposal before I joined Printrak. For a prior employer (located in Monterey Park), I worked with an outside consultant to develop an RFP to help my employer select a vendor for a computer system. The questions posed to the bidders were not complex. Frankly, it was a simple checklist. Does your computer system perform function A? Does it perform function B?
The outside consultant and I sent the final RFP to several computer system providers, and received several proposals in response.
- A few of the proposals checked every box, saying that they could do anything and everything. We threw those proposals out, because we knew that no one could meet every one of our demanding requirements. (“I can’t trust that response.”)
- We focused on the proposals that included more realistic responses. (“That respondent really thought about the questions.”)
As you can see, we introduced a qualitative, emotional element into our consideration phase.
According to Kaye Putnam, this is not uncommon.
Qualitative consideration
Humans think that we are very logical when we consider alternatives, and that our consideration processes are logical and quantitative. Putnam has looked into this assertion and says that it’s hogwash. Take a look at this excerpt from Putnam’s first brand psychology secret:
Your brand has to meet people at that emotional level – if you want them to buy. (And I know you do!)
Findings from several studies support this, but one of the most seminal was outlined in Harvard professor Gerald Zellman’s 2003 book, The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer. Zellman’s research and learnings prompted him to come to the industry-rocking conclusion that, “95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind.”
From Kaye Putnam, “7 Brand Psychology Secrets – Revealed!” (link)
But how can the subconscious mind affect quantitative evaluations?
While logic still has to play SOME role in a purchase decision (as Putnam further explains in her first and second brand psychology secrets), a positive or negative predisposition toward a bidder can influence the quantitative scores.
Imagine if the evaluators got together and discussed the Bredmarket and Debamarket responses to question 96, above. The back and forth between the evaluators may sound like this:
- “OK, we’re up to question 96. That’s a no brainer, because no one would ever put song references in a BGA blog post.”
- “Yeah, but did you see Bredemarket’s own post that has multiple references to the song ‘Dead Man’s Curve’?”
- “So what? Bredemarket would never do that when writing for a government agency. That piece was solely for Bredemarket.”
- “How do you KNOW that Bredemarket would never slip a song reference into a BGA post? You know, I really don’t trust that guy. He wore two different colored shoes to the orals presentation, a brown one and a black one. Someone as slopy as that could do anything, with huge consequences for BGA communications. I’m deducting points from Bredemarket for question 96.”
- “OK. I think you’re being ridiculous, but if you say so.”
And just like that, your quantitative logical consideration process is exposed as a bunch of subconscious emotional feelings.
How does qualitative consideration affect you?
As you develop your collateral for the consideration phase, you need to go beyond logic (even if you have a Sage predisposition) and speak to the needs and pain points of your prospects.
Yes, pain.
Here’s a example from my law enforcement automated fingerprint identificaiton system (AFIS) days.
- If your prospect is a police chief who is sick and tired of burglars ransacking homes and causing problems for the police department, don’t tell your prospect about your AFIS image detail or independent accuracy testing results. After all, 1000 ppi and 99.967 accuracy are only numbers.
- Provide the police chief with customer-focused benefit statements about how quickly your AFIS will clean up the burglary problem in the town, giving residents peace of mind and the police department less stress.
If you can appeal to those emotions, that police chief will consider you more highly and move on to conversion (purchase).
Can I help?
If your messaging concentrates on things your prospects don’t care about, most of them will ignore you and not shower you with money. Using the wrong words with your customers impacts your livelihood, and may leave you poor and destitute with few possessions.
If you need a writer to work with you to ensure that your written content includes the right words that speak directly to your prospects, hire…Debamarket!
Oh wait. Debamarket is fictional.
OK, talk to Bredemarket then.
- Email me at john.bredehoft@bredemarket.com.
- Book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket.
- Contact me at bredemarket.com/contact/.
Thank you to my Bredemarket clients
Thank you.
We Don’t Need Customer Focus Because Our Product Is So Great
It’s always good to question previous thoughts, and that’s what I’m doing right now.
In the past, I’ve stated that the best way to attract awareness (and eventually revenue) is to focus on customers and their needs.
But what if I’m wrong? (I’ve been wrong before.)
The benefits of product focus
What if a stellar product is all that is needed to attract business and gain revenue?
After all, aren’t the benefits of a great product obvious at first glance?
If we stop with the claptrap of understanding our target audiences and pain points and stuff, and just focus on ourselves and our great product, we’ll have a clearly focused message…
…um…
…that no one will give a hoot about.
“OK, I’m glad that your Super Duper Gizmo is so great, but so what? What’s in it for me? Why should I care?”
I guess I was right when talking about customer focus.
Sure, talk about your product, but start with the customer first and their needs. Then say how your product benefits the customer, exceeds their needs, and delights them.
(So why did I write this piece of content? Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest…um, suggested that my website needed yet another article on customer focus. I thought I’d do something a little different this time.)
When You Wear a Blindfold, You Cannot See
I know that “when you wear a blindfold you cannot see” is one of those seemingly obvious truths, like “the heat was hot” (the band America) or “water is wet” (a preschool teacher).
You would never intentionally blindfold yourself while driving a car, or while performing any other activity that requires your vision.
But when we conduct business, do we unintentionally blindfold ourselves when we don’t focus on our customers’ needs?
The client who lost $100 million
Sometimes we are oblivious of our own actions.
Ali Al-Faraj wrote a LinkedIn post about the importance of cultural awareness. He started the post as follows:
I had a client who lost a $100M investment–
Because of slamming his hand on a table.
From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alfaraj_i-had-a-client-who-lost-a-100m-investment-activity-7042162614579163137-VyDr/
Al-Faraq’s client was a “hardcore” American salesperson who was presenting to a Middle Eastern investment firm. His hardcore presentation didn’t go well, especially when he started slamming his hand on the table.
To see how the investment firm reacted, see the original post. (Although I guess you already figured out that the client didn’t get the money. Al-Faraq didn’t bury the lede.)
What the client did BEFORE he slammed his hand on the table
But when I read Al-Faraq’s description of the meeting, I realized that his client lost his audience long before the client pounded the table. Al-Faraq’s post includes this key sentence.
He dove into the presentation.
From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alfaraj_i-had-a-client-who-lost-a-100m-investment-activity-7042162614579163137-VyDr/
Middle Easterners value cultivating relationships. In fact, this source asserts that “[i]nitial meetings are all about relationship building.” Diving into a presentation during the first meeting before your audience knows about you is understandably upsetting.
But this is not limited to business with Middle Easterners.
Diving into a presentation without understanding your audience is a serious mistake in any culture.
The Work Lady does her homework
Many years ago, before Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility were formed, there was one Motorola. And one year when I was at Motorola, our Biometric User’s Conference engaged Jan McInnis, The Work Lady, as one of our speakers.
When she spoke at our conference, McInnis did not just dive into her morning presentation unprepared. Before her session, she spent some time with the conference organizers and asked questions about her audience, so that she could understand them better and why this “AFIS” thing was so important to these people.
She didn’t just do that for us. It’s a standard part of her process.
Prior to the event, Jan has a conference call with your conference committee to incorporate specific challenges your group is facing into her keynote!
From https://theworklady.com/
Her homework makes all the difference for her audiences.
Focus on the customer
McInnis, Al-Faraq, and many of you understand that to have success with a customer, you have to understand the customer. As Ali Al-Faraq says: “Knowing your audience is key!”
Don’t intentionally blindfold yourself before approaching your customer.
How Bredemarket’s Six Questions Support Strategic Content Marketing
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
Just for fun, I’m going to challenge my assertion that there are six questions that your content creator must ask you before creating content.
I ought to know about these six questions. As a content marketing expert, I wrote the book on the topic.
If you haven’t read the e-book, the six questions are:
- Why?
- How?
- What?
- Goal?
- Benefits?
- Target Audience?
The idea is that your content creator hosts a kickoff session, asks you the six questions, and only then starts to create the content in question—the blog post, case study, or whatever.
Are the six questions overkill?
But simplicity advocates may argue that those six questions are five questions too many.
Analysis paralysis may prevent you from moving forward at all, much less realizing your content creation goal. Perhaps you should be more efficient and just put pen to paper and, as the shoe people say, just do it.
I found a content marketing expert who agreed with this assertion, and wrote a post entitled “In marketing, move quickly.”
That content marketing expert was…well, it was me.
I ran across a local company (which I will not name) that issued a press release in December 2021. In part, the press release mentioned the local company’s new dedication to the marketing function.
From https://bredemarket.com/2022/03/23/in-marketing-move-quickly/
The company had hired an international marketing firm “to develop comprehensive marketing strategies….We expect their work to incorporate a website redesign, brand refresh, new strategic messaging and content, as well as focused video and digital campaigns.”
So, when I wrote the “In marketing, move quickly” post three months later, what had this international marketing firm accomplished in the interim?
The website has a full slew of data sheets on the company’s products, and I found a 2017 brochure that effectively served as a white paper. But that’s it; no other white papers, and no case studies describing happy customers’ experiences.
The company’s YouTube channel has two videos from 2021.
The company’s Facebook page hasn’t posted anything since 2017.
Neither of the company’s LinkedIn pages (yes, the company has two LinkedIn pages) has any posts.
From https://bredemarket.com/2022/03/23/in-marketing-move-quickly/
Now I have no visibility into this particular company, but I’ve been around the block to guess that the international marketing firm was probably still in the analysis stage, optimizing synergies according to “out of the box” criteria, to ensure bleeding-edge revenue maximization.
No, the six questions aren’t overkill
After reviewing what I wrote before in that blog post, I realize that my e-book lacks a very important point.
Don’t spend three months answering the six questions.
I shouldn’t HAVE to say this, but perhaps it’s safer to explicitly say it.
Now practices can very from consultation to consultation, but it’s very likely that a content creator and their client can breeze through those six questions in half an hour or less.
Or maybe the client can answer the questions on their own before the meeting.
If your content marketing expert schedules six one-hour meetings (or worse still, workshops) to address the six questions, run away!
(Is the content marketing expert billing by the hour?)
And the six questions create a content strategy
There’s something else that I failed to explicitly say in my e-book.
Not only do the answers to the six questions benefit that one piece of content, but they benefit everything else that your company does.
For example, let’s say that a content marketing expert is working with a gourmet ice cream shoppe (not a shop, but a shoppe), and the proprietor (Jane Cold) answers the “how” question as follows:
At Jane’s Gourmet Ice Cream Shoppe, we keep the internal dining temperature below 50 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure that our guests enjoy ice cream as it was meant to be enjoyed. We inform our guests of our temperature policy beforehand to ensure they bring proper attire.
Now let’s say that the piece of content in question is a social media post describing a new farkleberry ice cream flavor. (Thanks, Live Eat Learn.)
While the content marketing expert will use the answer to the “how” question to create the content, the ramifications go far beyond the social media post itself.
- Perhaps the new flavor could be branded “Frigid Farkleberry” to suggest how the ice cream should best be enjoyed.
- Maybe in addition to branding, the “how” answer may even influence pricing. Perhaps prices incorporate the number “32,” as in a single-scoop price of $4.32. (Yes that price is high, but after all this is an ice cream shoppe.)
And what of future social media posts?
Let me clue you in on a little secret: once your content marketing expert has asked the six questions for the first piece of content, the kickoff is much quicker for subsequent pieces of content.
Chances are the basic “why” and “how” won’t change, although some of the later questions such as the target audience could change for each individual piece of content.
So without explicitly trying to do so, the six questions have created a de facto content marketing strategy. After creating five pieces of content, you’ve essentially defined your company’s mission, purpose, and differentiators, and may have defined as many as five separate vertical markets along the way.
Not a bad investment of thirty minutes of time.
(But a terrible investment of three months of time.)
An exercise for you
Normally this is the point where I’d tell you to contact me if you want to use Bredemarket’s content marketing expertise. But this time I’m going to do something different.
- Why don’t you think of a piece of content you want to create?
- Once you’ve decided on that, why don’t you ask yourself the six questions?
- Once you have the answers, why don’t you see what type of overall content marketing strategy you can shape, solely based on those six responses?
Lockheed Martin’s Anti-biofouling Customer Focus
Businesses exist to serve their customers, something Lockheed Martin says when talking about itself.
Lockheed Martin’s customer-first mentality is a big way the company stands out from its competitors.
From https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2020/how-lockheed-martin-anticipates-customer-needs.html
It’s nice to claim a “customer-first mentality,” but Lockheed Martin has provided an example of how it demonstrates customer focus.
The problem
Here’s how Lockheed Martin defined the problem that one of its customers was facing.
Biofouling is the buildup of barnacles and microorganisms on ocean-going vessels such as ships and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). This buildup is a naturally occurring process which can increase drag and decrease ship fuel economy, ultimately costing customers hundreds of millions of dollars. The United States Navy needs to eliminate biofouling growth along the underside of its ships, which involves a cleaning process that requires a ship to be out of commission for up to 18 months and hundreds of hours of manual labor.
From https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2020/how-lockheed-martin-anticipates-customer-needs.html
Maybe your customers aren’t quite as big as the United States Navy, but your customers have problems also, and they’re relying on you to solve them.
A solution from nature
For aeronautical engineer Joseph Keegan, the solution to the Navy’s problem lay in the sea snake.
Because defense contractors think about sea snakes all the time. Or at least Keegan did.
Keegan decided to apply for funding for a project that mimicked how a sea snake mitigates biofouling growth. The sea snake has a clever way to mitigate growth by organically shedding its skin to rid itself of biofouling growth and disease when the growth begins to affect its movement.
From https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2020/how-lockheed-martin-anticipates-customer-needs.html
OK, an ocean vessel isn’t going to literally shed its hull. But that’s why Keegan needed research funding. And the researchers came up with a solution, and started to test it.
A Lockheed Martin team took the idea from paper to prototype and went to Ventura Harbor, California to conduct static testing of a multilayer mylar skin on various surfaces including fiberglass, steel and aluminum. After leaving the prototype in the harbor for a little over a month, results confirmed that the films were effective in demonstrating that biofouling growth could be easily removed by peeling a layer of the film. The test was also successful in proving that the films did not allow for biofouling growth to occur between the multiple layers of film or underneath the four-layer prototype. No degradation to the films has been observed in the five months of testing.
From https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2020/how-lockheed-martin-anticipates-customer-needs.html
Anticipated benefits
While Lockheed Martin’s write-up includes the common researcher statement “further efforts are needed to successfully implement this biofouling film technology,” it looks like the project is moving forward.
And Lockheed Martin has already identified the benefits of the completed project. Not the benefits to Lockheed Martin, but the benefits to its customer, the U.S. Navy.
With the potential to reduce the time a Navy ship remains out of commission for cleaning, this nature-inspired design idea could…save money and enable greater mission readiness…
From https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2020/how-lockheed-martin-anticipates-customer-needs.html
Saving money and getting ships out to battle more quickly. Stuff that the Navy likes.
Of course this benefits Lockheed Martin also, but the company kept the focus on the Navy.
How does this apply to my company?
Even if your customers don’t battle biofouling barnacles, and even if your customers don’t face problems that put their equipment out of commission for 18 months or cost hundreds of hours in labor, there’s a lesson to be learned from Lockheed Martin’s customer focus.
- Keep your focus on your customer, not you.
- Describe the problem your customer faces.
- Define your solution to the problem.
- List the benefits your customer receives from your solution.
If your solutions benefit your customers, then you’ll receive benefits also.
Six questions your content creator should ask you
If you want a content marketing expert to write for your business, do you just say “Write this, and make it viral”?
Six words of instruction will not result in great content.
Even if you just say “Write this” and leave off the viral part, this will not work either.
You and your content creator have to have a shared understanding of what the content will be.
For example, as I indicated in a previous post, you and your content creator have to agree on the tone of voice to use in the content. The content creator could write something in a tone of voice that may not match your voice at all, which would mean that the content would sound horribly wrong to your audience.
Imagine a piece for financial executives written in the style of Crazy Eddie. Ouch.
And that’s just one thing that could go wrong when you and your content creator are not on the same…um, page.
Bredemarket’s content creation process includes six questions
When Bredemarket works with you to create content, I use a content creation process. I’ve revised my original content creation process several times, and I’m sure I’ll revise it more as I work with more of you.
But as of today, Bredemarket’s kickoff meetings with clients begin with six high-level questions that set the scene for everything that follows.
Question One: Why?
As I noted in my Simon Sinek post, the “why?” question needs to be answered before any other question is asked.
Before you ask a content creator to write a case study about how your Magnificent Gizmo cures bad breath, you need to understand why you’re in the good breath business in the first place. Did you have an unpleasant childhood experience? Were you abandoned at the altar? WHY did you care enough to create the Magnificent Gizmo in the first place?
(As I write this post, I’m going to look at how each of these six questions can be answered for the post itself. After all, it’s fair to ask: Why does Bredemarket do what it does? Short answer: because I write. You can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. For the longer answer, read the “Who I Am” page on the Bredemarket website.)
Question Two: How?
You also need to make sure your content creator can explain how you do what you do. Have you created your own set of algorithms that make breath good? Do you conduct extensive testing with billions of people, with their consent? How is your way of doing things superior to that of your competitors?
(Now if you’re asking the “how” of Bredemarket, my content creation process is the “how.” After these initial six questions, there are other things that I do, and things that you do. Here’s how I create content of 400 to 600 words. Here’s how I create content of 2,800 to 3,200 words.)
Question Three: What?
Once these are clear in your mind, you’re ready to talk about the “what.” As Sinek notes, many people start with the “what” and then proceed to the “how,” and may or may not even answer the “why.” But when you ask the “why” first and the “how” second, your “what” description is much better.
(Again, you may be asking what Bredemarket does. I craft the words to communicate with technical and non-technical audiences. For additional clarification, read “What I Do,” which also notes what I don’t do. Sorry, finger/face/ID document vendors.)
Question Four: Goal?
Once the Golden Circle is defined, we’re ready to dig a little deeper into the specific piece of content you want. We’re not ready to talk about page count and fonts, yet, though. There’s a few other things we need to settle.
What is the goal of the content? Simple awareness of the product or service you provide? Or are you ready for consideration? Or is it time for conversion? The goal affects the content dramatically.
(In the case of this post, the goal is primarily awareness, but if you’re ready for conversion to become a paying customer, I won’t turn you away.)
Question Five: Benefits?
I’ve written ad nauseum on the difference between benefits and features, so for this question five about benefits I’ll just briefly say that written content works best when it communicates how the solution will help (benefit) the customer. A list of features will not make a difference to a customer who has specific needs. Do you meet those needs? Maintain a customer focus.
(Bredemarket’s primary benefit is focused content that meets your needs. There are others, depending upon your industry and the content you require.)
Question Six: Target Audience?
This one is simple to understand.
- If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing for kids who buy lollipops in convenience stores, you’ll write one way.
- If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing to the convenience stores who could carry your lollipops, you’ll write another way.
Now sometimes content creators get fancy and create personas and all that (Jane Smith is a 54 year old single white owner of a convenience store in a rural area with an MBA and a love for Limp Bizkit), but the essential thing is that you understand who you want to read your content.
(This particular piece is targeted for business owners, executives, directors, and managers, especially in California’s Inland Empire, who have a need to create focused content that speaks to their customers. The target audience not only affects how I am writing this post, but also how I will distribute it.)
What if you use a different content creator?
I am forced to admit that not everyone chooses Bredemarket to create their content.
- Maybe you create your content yourself.
- Maybe you already have access to content creators.
- Or maybe you have a limited budget and can only pay a penny a word to your content creator. Let’s face it, a five dollar blog post does sound attractive.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use these six questions. I did publish them, after all, and they’re based on questions that others have asked.
If you create your own content, ask yourself these six questions before you begin. They will focus your mind and make your final content better.
If you have someone else create your content, make sure that you provide the answers for your content creator. For example, if you seek a content creator on Upwork or Fiverr, put the answers to these questions in your request for quotes. Experienced writers will appreciate that you’re explaining the why, how, what, goal, benefits, and target audience at the very beginning, and you’ll get better quotes that way. If someone knows your target audience is crime scene examiners, then you’ll (hopefully) see some quotes that describe the writer’s experience in writing for crime scene examiners.
And if you provide the answers to those six questions and your content creator says, “That doesn’t matter. I write the same for everyone,” run away.
Maybe the resulting content will even go viral. (The good viral.)
What if you want to use Bredemarket?
Or perhaps you’ve decided that you don’t want to trust your content to someone on Upwork and Fiverr, and you want to work with me instead. After all, I can help you with white papers, case studies, blog posts, proposal responses, or other written content. (Well, unless the written content involves finger, face, driver’s license, or related identity services. There’s the day job, you know.)
Ah, we’ve moved from awareness to consideration. Great.
If I can work with you to create your written content, please contact me.
- Send me an email at john.bredehoft@bredemarket.com.
- Or go to calendly.com/bredemarket to book a Saturday morning meeting with me.
- Or go to bredemarket.com/contact/ to use my contact form.
And to make our meeting even smoother, start thinking about the answers to the six questions I posed above.
Users are not stupid; systems are
For years, I have been working with computer systems that are used by people. Sometimes I forget that, but then someone like Mike Rathwell reminds me of this fact. Just like Jake Kuramoto reminded me of that fact 12 years ago. It’s all about customer focus, after all.
Mike Rathwell says that users are not stupid
Mike, a former coworker of mine whom I’ve mentioned before, just wrote an article fpr Modus Create entitled “Why ‘Techsplaining’ is a Bad Idea for System Admins.”
Rathwell begins by asking why people administer Atlassian systems (or, frankly, any system).
…the real reason we are around to administer this particular system is because real humans are using this system to do real things. Without humans using this system to do real things, administering it is purely an academic exercise. As such, we are here to ensure that this particular system supports, and continues to support, doing these things.
From https://moduscreate.com/blog/system-admin/?utm_content=221412142
Fine, and water is wet. So what?
Perhaps there are those that think that the users of an Atlassian system are required to serve the needs of the system. That’s backwards. The Atlassian system is required to serve the needs of its users.
Even if they do stupid things and ask stupid questions.
Except they don’t.
Rathwell emphasizes that users do NOT ask stupid questions.
Be sure to read the rest of the article, which states that “techsplaining” is a bad idea also.
But I’m going to travel back in time to another instance in which users were called “stupid.”
Jake Kuramoto says that users are not stupid
Perhaps some of you remember this one.
Most of us access social platforms by performing some type of “login” process. Now logins can take many different forms (password, fob, biometric, whatever), but the process is basically the same.
- You go to a place on the Internet.
- You “login.”
- You are now able to access your social platform of choice.
Now some of us intuitively understand how to “go to a place on the Internet” and “login.”
And back in 2010, there was a group of people who had a sure-fire method of doing this. Specifically, they would go to this thing on their computer (they didn’t know what it was called, but it was on the computer), type “facebook login,” click on the link that came up, type in their login and password, and access Facebook.
Now “this thing on their computer” was the Google search page in their web browser of choice. And they would search for “facebook login,” and the first search result would happen to be facebook.com. Once they made it to facebook.com, they would type in their login and password.
This was a method that people had perfected, and it worked 100% of the time.
Until it didn’t.
Here’s Jake’s summary of what happened:
The short version is:
ReadWriteWeb posted “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“.
Google indexed the post.
The post became the top result for the keywords “facebook login”.
People using Google to find their way to Facebook were misdirected to the post.
The comments on the post were littered with unhappy people, unable to login to Facebook.
From http://theappslab.com/2010/02/11/these-are-our-users/
(Incidentally, if you go to Kuramoto’s post, you’ll find a link to the ReadWriteWeb article. That link no longer works, primarily because ReadWriteWeb is now ReadWrite. Maybe the spiders sued. The current link as of 2022 is https://readwrite.com/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login/.)
So what broke down? When a new page became the top search result, people would NOT end up at facebook.com, but would instead end up at a ReadWriteWeb blog post. This blog post did NOT have anywhere to enter your Facebook login and password. So…Facebook is broken!
Now most if not all of the people reading my post right now know that you need to go to the facebook.com URL to log in to Facebook, and that you cannot log in to Facebook via (then) readwriteweb.com. But then again, the people that are reading my post right now actually know what the acronym “URL” means. (If you don’t, it stands for Uniform Resource Locator.)
Now find someone who doesn’t know the difference between a computer monitor and a web browser and explain to that person what a Uniform Resource Locator is.
Now there were two schools of thought on the whole ReadWriteWeb / Facebook login episode.
The one school of thought maintained that anyone who thought that they could login to Facebook via ReadWriteWeb was stupid, and that everybody should know to bookmark the facebook.com URL or type it into their browser rather than searching and running into an unbelievably successful SEO campaign.
But that school assumed that everyone knew what a URL is, or what SEO is. (Search engine optimization. Try explaining that one while you’re explaining Uniform Resource Locator.)
And Jake, despite his technical chops (he was with the Oracle AppsLab when he wrote this post), stated the same thought that Mike Rathwell would echo twelve years later.
I think it’s fair to say that computers shouldn’t make people feel stupid.
From http://theappslab.com/2010/02/11/these-are-our-users/
I say that users are not stupid
If you want to get to your favorite social platform, you shouldn’t have to know acronyms like SEO or URL or HTTPS. The only thing that you need to know is the name of the platform you want to access. (Otherwise you’ll end up at MySpace. Or Grindr.)
I’ll take it one step further. If the myriad of systems that make up your computer can’t figure out what you want to do, then it’s the computer and its many systems that are stupid, not you.
Now I just have to take Rathwell’s message to heart and avoid “techsplaining” myself.
And when I write, I need to continuously keep my customers (or, more accurately, my customers’ customers) in mind. I’m writing for them, not for me. Create messages that resonate with them. And if the audience is non-technical, don’t assume that they know what SEO and URL and HTTPS mean.
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