We’ve talked about why most push marketing tactics fail and how to do it right. Today, let’s focus on pull. Here’s why most organic content doesn’t deliver results and how to fix it to attract clients: The Soviet Union had a shortage of nails during Lenin’s government. To increase production, Soviet officials started setting quotas…
Category: How Brands Win
The How Chain: A Simple Questioning Method to Reveal Your Brand’s Onlyness
You might have seen it on the news. On Monday, there was a blackout in Spain (where I live) for 12 hours. No electricity. No phone line. No traffic lights, no metros, no trains. Some people got stuck in elevators for hours. Some others couldn’t buy food since they didn’t have cash. Total chaos. When…
Why Serving Multiple Client Types Kills Growth (And How To Choose The Ideal One)
In 2012, Hubspot was bleeding customers. They spent a lot of resources on customer acquisition. But customers didn’t stick around and churned out after a few months. So their customer lifetime value was low. That meant they couldn’t increase marketing budgets further and hire a bigger team to scale. Hubspot’s executive team realized they had…
14 Questions to Audit Your Homepage Messaging (Before It Silently Kills Sales)
You know this as a buyer. When you plan to buy a B2B service, you go to that brand’s website. You read the homepage. You try to understand what they do, how they do it, and how they are different. And based on what you see, you form an opinion and make a decision: to…
Why Buyers Are Becoming Immune To “Push” Marketing (And How To Do It Right)
You know about this. Marketing tactics fall into two categories: push and pull. “Push” tactics are interruptions. They interrupt a potential buyer and ask for an action. Meanwhile, “pull” tactics are the opposite. You make buyers come to you by offering them content they might be interested in. There is an inherent problem with push…
Brand Ideology: Why Your Brand Needs An Ideology To Stand Out (And How To Develop One)
Think about it. How come some brands have passionate believers like political parties? People even do irrational stuff for some brands. Like getting into a line at 5 a.m. to buy products or defending it against negative comments online as if somebody cursed their mother. It’s almost like some brands become part of customers’ identities.…
Category Ladders: How to Get Buyers To Think Of Your Brand First
What brands come to your mind when you hear “accounting firms”? You can probably list 3-4 brands. First, you’d think about Deloitte. Then you’d continue with the other ones you know, like PwC, Ernst & Young, your own accountant, etc. The same applies if I tell you “toothpaste” or “energy drink.” Buyers remember a shortlist…
How Goal Dilution Kills Your Brand’s Believability (And How To Avoid It)
In 1996, two Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized the largest internet search engines were doing it wrong. Yahoo and MSN manually curated sites like a directory. So you could only search for certain things. AltaVista had a slightly more advanced algorithm. It ranked sites depending on how many times your search…
How The Curse Of Knowledge Ruins Brands’ Value (And How To Avoid It)
In 2007, two MIT students —Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi— created a solution to a modern problem. Laptops and smartphones were becoming more common. And they realized people needed a simple way to access their files from different devices. So they developed an app that allowed users to store their files in the “cloud.” They…
Why Customers Want Freedom *From* Choice (And How You Can Provide It To Sell More)
It’s Friday night. You finally have a chance to relax on your sofa after a long week. You decide to watch a movie with your partner. So you get some snacks and open Netflix to choose a movie to watch. You have a quick look at Netflix’s suggestions. Nothing interesting. So you scroll to the…
