Tag Archives: marketing

The “Open to Work” Effect

Jobseekers, including myself, have endured endless debates about the pros and cons of LinkedIn’s “Open to Work” green banner. While these debates seem to have died down, there are still arguments about whether the green banner does more harm than good.

  • The good? Legitimate employers know that you are open to work.
  • The harm? Scammers, AI-powered resume writers, and other ne’er-do-wells also know that you are open to work.

Customers won’t find you unless you buy this shady service

But this is not confined to jobseekers.

  • Bredemarket receives an uncounted number of telephone calls, from multiple numbers, all of which begin with the same question: “Am I speaking to the business owner?”
  • The caller then offers a free consultation regarding your Google Business listing and your Google voice search results.
  • And when I bother to take the calls, they are disappointed to hear that Google yanked my Google Business listing (Google never told me why, but I assume it relates to the fact that I do not physically conduct business at my UPS Store mailing address).
  • And that it was the best thing for me when Google did that.

You don’t walk up to my office and request a retainer or hourly services or small projects. You contact me by various means and we talk, you in your office and me in mine. Even the local customers aren’t going to drop by, especially since my City of Ontario business license prohibits me from meeting customers at my home.

Anyway, all these cold callers are NOT part of Bredemarket’s target audience.

And the myriad of Google Business Listing advisors are just one of the types of people who have no interest in buying my services.

How to attract real prospects

So I create Bredemarket’s content to attract identity, biometric, and technology marketing professionals. Two recent examples:

Advent International Plans to Sell IDEMIA Public Security
Amadeus!
Proof of Humanity Does Not Prove Identity
Uniqueness is not identity.

Oh, and I also create content for wildebeest fans.

Ideal Bot Profile?

While I’m currently concentrating on HUMAN identities (book on the way), the world is moving in a different direction.

Elena Verna points this out:

“Everyone (I think?) agrees that defining your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is important….

“But there’s an assumption baked into all of this: Your user is human. I think that assumption is breaking.

“As agents begin to interact with products on our behalf – often via protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) – your ‘user’ may never actually touch your product.

“Which changes pretty much everything.”

Verna highlights how to market when your ideal “customer” is a bot, and what the bots look for.

“[Other products] will become almost entirely invisible. They exist as infrastructure. As a codified set of rules that is hard to reproduce. They are never opened directly, never explored, never ‘used’ in the traditional sense. They are just… there, powering outcomes. And you know what, I think most of the B2B will fall here.”

So I’m definitely concentrating on people for the next few days, but I haven’t forgotten my bot buddies.

Silence is Golden…For Your Competitors

When we refuse to share our good news…

…and when we refuse to share our bad news…

…we allow our competitors to drive the conversation.

Grok.

Don’t surrender your message…and your prospects…to the competition.

Let Bredemarket help you create customer-focused, benefit-oriented content.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers
Stop losing prospects!

Why Identity/Biometric Prospects of Marketing and Writing Firms Benefit from Specificity

Bredemarket markets to identity/biometric firms that market to their own prospects.

And this quote from Aja Frost at HubSpot is relevant to anyone who markets to anyone, and wants to attract attention from people using Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and other large language models to answer questions. You need to practice answer engine optimization (AEO).

“In the old world, you’d be publishing ‘The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing.’ And in the AEO world, you are publishing ‘The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing If You Work at a Logistics Company in New Jersey’ because answer engines surface highly relevant, contextualized, tailored information to every person who is using them.“

HubSpot preaches something very similar to Never Search Alone: when you cast a wide net, there are too many holes.

Google Gemini.

This reminded me that I need to narrow my focus whenever possible and address the issues important to marketing leaders at identity and biometric firms.

What types of “highly relevant, contextualized, tailored information” do identity/biometric prospects need?

What types of customer-focused benefits resonate with them?

How can a biometric product marketing expert help identity/biometric firms?

Why don’t you ask me, and we can work together to create that highly relevant content?

I Heartily Agree

Here’s a quote from Runar Bjorhovde, senior analyst for smartphones and connected devices at Omdia.

“I think the biggest step many biometrics players can take to prove their importance is within marketing — in addition to maintaining their current innovation. Actually explaining why these sensors are so important and what they enable can massively help to simplify them to users, consequently making the value easier to understand.”

I heartily agree that the “why” is important.

Mary the Marketing Leader

Back in 2022 I worked on various prospect personas, described in Word documents. Although I feel that personas are overrated, they do serve a purpose.

In those days, to use the persona you would have to read the Word document and evaluate your content against what you just read.

It’s different today with generative AI.

I spent Tuesday evening writing a persona specification for “Mary the Marketing Leader,” the persona for Bredemarket’s chief prospect. This is something I would enter into Google Gemini as a prompt. “Mary” would then ask me questions, and I would ask her questions in turn.

As of December 23 (yeah, this is a scheduled post), the persona specification has 30 bullets arranged into four sections: role, context, tone and constraints.

And no, I’m not going to share it with you.

One reason is that I don’t want to share my insights with my product marketing expert competitors. This is pretty much a Bredemarket trade secret.

The other reason is that some of my bullets are brutally honest about Mary, and even though she’s fake, she still might take offense about the things I say about her. One example:

“When working with product marketing and other consultants, Mary sometimes takes a week to provide feedback on content drafts because higher priority tasks and emergencies must be handled first.”

Such comments are all through the specification, so you’re not gonna see it.

But maybe you’ll see the benefits of this specification and use the persona, tweak it, and use it again.

For example, I’ve already learned that my 30 years of identity experience can resonate with MY prospects, as can my statement “I ask, then I act.”

Now I just have to recast Bredebot as a persona specification. That will help me immensely.