Help, Don’t Hype: A guide to customer-first marketing
In the AI Guild, I conduct a lot of group coaching of landing pages, emails, and other marketing. And I’ve found myself uttering the same phrase over and over…
Help, don’t hype
Think of it this way. Take off your hat as a marketing professional or business owner just for a moment and put on your customer hat.
You have a goal you’d like to achieve. Or perhaps a pain point you want to overcome. You go on a journey to meet that goal or overcome that pain point. That journey begins by not even understanding what options there are to meet your goal or stop your pain, and it ends by making a commitment, sometimes an expensive commitment (in not just money, but also, time and trust) with a specific company to buy a project or service.
What would you prefer along that journey? To be sold to? Or to be helped?
Anti-marketing sentiment
Tell someone at a dinner party you work in marketing. Or are heavily involved in marketing as a business owner.
You likely won’t get the same reaction as a doctor or teacher.
Why?
Because marketing has a reputation for hype.
Let’s get in front of potential customers – with digital ads, print ads, and TV commercials. Or, eesh, even worse, with cold email (i.e. spam) and cold calling (i.e. telemarketing).
Then, let’s tell them how amazing our product is: “Unleash the Power of Precision with Acme Sprockets – Revolutionize Your Machinery Today!”
Acme Sprockets may in fact be amazing. I don’t know. But I do know this – just because you can brag and boast about something in your ad, doesn’t mean you should. Because what consumer really believes all that hype today?
I love this example from Transparent Marketing. Flint McGlaughlin (CEO of MeclabsAI, which is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa) and the team at MarketingExperiments found a snake oil liniment ad from 1912.
They ran the exact same ad in a newspaper in the same city in 2003. From a circulation of 35,000, they didn’t get a single sale. Zip. Zero. Zilch. That’s a cost per acquisition of…uh, not very good.
I’m sure this doesn’t shock you. What might surprise you more is that snake oil used to be a real product. People use to read a newspaper ad that said – ‘The greatest medicine on Earth. It has no equal. It relieves all pain instantly…” – and believe it.
Sadly, marketers have abused that trust. And consumers are now skeptical.
You might say to me ‘C’mon Daniel, none of my copy is that hype-filled.’ And I’m sure it’s not. But ask yourself – at the core, are you hyping or helping? A more recent example from an experiment run by the Meclabs team.
- Control: 7 Reasons to Choose a [Brand Name anonymized] Thermal Imager
- Treatment: You’re One Quick Download Away from Finding Your Perfect Infrared Amerca
- Results: 96% relative increase in leads generated (you can see the full experiment in this article about changing the presentation of incentive content, more than just the headline changed and those other changes also likely affected results)
It’s only a subtle difference. Perhaps you don’t even notice. Can you see the focus on hype in the control? And on helping in the treatment? Which are you doing with your marketing right now?
The business case for helping people with customer-first marketing
I think it’s a much more fulfilling career to help other humans trying to navigate existence on this planet than hype them. But this is a business publication, so let’s not go there. Let’s look at cold, hard data.
In October 2016, we surveyed a representative sample of 2,400 American consumers. We asked half of them to think about a company they were satisfied with, and the other half to consider a company they were unsatisfied with, and then compared the results. You can see the full study here – MarketingSherpa Customer Satisfaction Research Study – but let me call your attention to a few findings.
You would assume that satisfied customers are more likely to continue purchasing products and services from your company. But look at just how big a difference there is – 66% of satisfied customers are very likely to continue purchasing, but only 8% of unsatisfied customers. That is a whopping 713% difference.
Then the question naturally becomes – well, how are satisfied and unsatisfied customers different?
When we asked satisfied customers about the marketing of the company they were satisfied with, the top response was ‘I consistently have good experiences with it.’ Which you would expect right? But of course, we can’t always control the outcome to make sure our customers always have that good experience. However, we can control our intention.
‘It doesn’t always try to sell to me but tried to provide value’ was the #3 response for satisfied customers (35%), versus ‘the company always tries to sell me instead of providing value’ the mirror image #3 response for unsatisfied customers (27%).
And while I didn’t emphasize it in this chart, if you look closely, you’ll see the #1 response of unsatisfied customers is ‘the company does not put my needs and wants above its business goals’ (35%).
And beyond just marketing, when we asked ‘how well do you feel [company name] prioritizes your needs as a customer against its own business goals, 29.9% of satisfied customers said they were ‘always a priority’ (versus 5.5% of unsatisfied customers) and 44.6% said they were a high priority (versus 7.2% of those who were unsatisfied).
Don’t start marketing until you have a Customer-first Objective
In the AI Guild, we provide group coaching on members’ landing pages, email, funnels, etc.
In a lot of the coaching, we realized that their marketing faced a far bigger conversion optimization opportunity than just improving the headline or design. Even with perfect communication on a landing page, the nature of the ‘ask’ needed help.
So we introduced the MEC200: Design Your Offer course in the AI Guild to help marketers and entrepreneurs get the offer right before they built their funnel (which takes place in MEC300: Develop Your Creative).
A key thought tool used in MEC200 is the Customer-first Objective which consists of three seemingly simple yet essential questions. Here’s an example for a company that conducts financial audits of hospitals:
| OBJECTIVE | QUESTION | YOUR ANSWER |
| TO HELP | How will you help the customer? | TO HELP administrators in hospital networks find cost savings |
| BY GIVING | What will you give the customer? | BY SHARING insights into commonly identified areas within the hospital operations that are resulting in negative financial impacts, as revealed by our comprehensive audits, illustrated through a case study example alongside a customized report that calculates their potential benefits |
| IN EXCHANGE FOR | What will you ask for in return? | IN EXCHANGE FOR their time to review the case study and provide five pieces of information needed to tailor the report, plus their email address |
Without the Customer-first Objective, this company would probably have a funnel and landing page focused on how great their audit services are, with a form that tries to get prospects on a call as soon as possible to buy their audit services. The page would probably say ‘The #1 best hospital audit accounting firm’ and be filled with testimonials to prove it and yadda, yadda, yadda.
In other words, hype.
However, with the Customer-first Objective, the team is forced to find a way to help the ideal customer. With this approach, they would build a landing page and funnel with information designed to help the ideal customer solve their pain point. A lot of people would probably get useful information without paying a dime. But this company would have won something better than a quick form fill – they would have won trust.
So for some of the people who went through this funnel – when the time/budget/need stars aligned – they would think of this company first to hire.
Because they were helped. They experienced a small taste of the value this company can provide.
“We must never forget that the goal of marketing is not to make a claim but to foster a conclusion.” That is a lesson often taught by Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MeclabsAI (parent organization of MarketingSherpa). People challenged with a claim naturally resist it. But people who arrive at a conclusion will inherently defend it.
Help, Don’t Hype in action – a real-world example that increased revenue 53%
HCSS is a construction software company that practices traditional lead generation marketing.
Then one day they tried something new. They sought to determine a pain point for their ideal customer – leaders at construction companies. It turned out the main challenge was hiring and getting enough talent into the industry in general.
So the HCSS team decides to create a community called ‘I Build America’ to recruit more workers into the construction industry. In other words, they simply tried to help their customers.
And then a funny thing happened. They were invited into all sorts of places that usually were reserved for only their much bigger competition. When prospects saw how helpful HCSS was in solving their core problem, they came to the natural conclusion that this would also be a good company to buy software from.
“It changes the conversation with the customer — it’s not about us and our software,” said Dan Briscoe, VP of Marketing, HCSS. You can watch Dan tell the full behind-the-scenes story in Making Your Customer the Hero: How a construction software company increased revenue 53% by doing the opposite of what feels right.
Questions to help you spur your best idea
If you want to take the’ help, don’t hype’ approach after reading this MarketingSherpa blog post but don’t know where to start, here are a few questions that can help:
- Identify the Core Customer Need or Problem: What is the principal need or challenge your ideal customers are facing?
- Determine the Value Proposition: What unique value can your organization offer to satisfy this need or solve this problem more effectively than alternatives? Is your answer only the direct sale of your product, or can you think of other ways that don’t cost your customer money? (your direct product sale may be the best Customer-first Objective, but first at least explore alternatives)
- Craft Your Customer-First Objective (see Don’t start marketing until you have a Customer-first Objective section above)
- Define Metrics for Success: How will you measure the objective’s impact on customer satisfaction and business outcomes?
- Help, Don’t Hype: Did this new approach improve results? And, hey, does it make you happy and more fulfilled in your job?
Related resources
To get ideas for helping your customers with artificial intelligence, join Flint McGlaughlin and the MeclabsAI team in an AI Quick Win Intensive.
Transparent Marketing: Do your campaigns sound like North Korean propaganda?
Customer Testimonials: 3 ways to leverage your customers to help tell your product’s story
Blandvertising: How you can overcome writing headlines and copy that don’t say anything
Categories: Customer-Centric Marketing
