Ignite Inbound Marketing from Within
Laxmi Gandhi and Jason Katz • December 22, 2021 • Paid Advertising & Digital Marketing
Software products are the hottest commodity but people cannot easily touch, taste or see them. So how do you get across the value of these products and instantly attract customers?
You have to go to a deeper level. Since customers cannot see the software, customers need to be able to visualize the value. Visualization happens through evoking a core emotion of a desire or need that needs to be met.
What you often see is a marketplace full of jargon that people do not readily understand. These businesses have a tough time expanding beyond their initial adopters. The failure to expand results from a lack of clarity around the business leader’s vision and goals. This can happen for a few reasons including:
Leaders often look to the market to find their value, making their true value proposition unclear.
Companies fit themselves into a small box to try to conform to what they think the market wants.
This results in marketing where customers do not automatically understand the unique value proposition because you are not saying anything different. To truly demonstrate your value, you need to look broader than your product.
OPERAScale’s Core Potential program is designed to help leaders find their inherent value to allow customers to instantly connect to the value behind their product. This allows for customers to be attracted to the company and proactively seek the product.
Core Potential Example
A great example of marketing that drove inbound marketing is United Masters. If you look at their one sentence statement you can immediately understand what they are doing for you as the customer - they are there to support you and power you to the next level.
“United Masters distributes your music, gives you tools to power your career, and unites you with the world’s biggest brands.”
That is you can visualize what the product is doing for you without actually seeing it. This allows the user experience to be at a deeper conscious level and captures your senses.
Companies that do not understand their core potential will focus on just advertising their product (in this case record distribution). But as a customer your decision to buy is driven by the desire to be your own record label - you do not necessarily care at first on how it becomes accomplished.
Source: UnitedMasters | Music services and brand opportunities for artists
This recognition by United Masters has made their app downloads skyrocket and become downloaded like wildfire. The apps explosion attracted the attention of TikTok.
“In just 18 months, United Masters says that it has amassed over 400,000 artists, 5 billion streams, and over 500,000 distributed tracks.”
The Current Market
If you attend any major tech conferences, you will notice that the marketing of the majority of companies tends to follow the latest jargon - AI, IOT, Edge computing etc. What do any of these terms mean in terms of the value they are providing? What is the customer going to get out of buying your product?
As customers we have no idea what you are actually doing because IOT is not a service or a product. It is a term invented to describe the interconnectivity of machines. It’s important to get out of the jargon and start telling customers what you actually do. Since these companies have not discovered their core potential they:
Look to find similar products or similar ideas that are comparable to new innovation.
Use these similarities to start describing idea.
Facebook started out by merely describing their product as an online directory. For most companies this works and they are able to obtain a good number of customers. However, if you can look beyond your product at your impact you will widen your customer base considerably. As Facebook matured, they were able to communicate the action of what they are actually doing - connecting. In essence, you must understand your business impact and role in the larger world.
The Evolution from Product to Action for Facebook:
2006 - Facebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at schools.
2007 - Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.
2009 - Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.
How do you get to your Core Potential?
To realize the full potential of a product, leaders need to connect at a personal level with their original desire to solve pain or create a new future. There are three critical moments in a leader’s journey that influence their core potential:
Moment of recognition: What did you observe as a pain point?
Moment of creation: What did you see as the solution?
Moment of inspiration: What inspired you to take action?
Your product or service’s true value comes from an internal, guided, creative vision for what is possible in the world, but hasn’t yet been executed. You communicate this core value to the world most effectively when you look within first to answer the biggest questions about your company and its purpose, as opposed to seeking answers from the world’s previous creations.
Create a new market
By finding your core potential, you are effectively creating your own market. This allows Growth Marketing Advisors to create paid advertising content that places your product in areas which would attract your target customers and partners. We can craft language that highlights your new core product categories and lines.
The paid advertising would not only be in a creative that is tuned into the Core Potential but also the targeting as well because we would find the audiences that most authentically value this Core Potential. Google through SEO and the big ad platforms Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn through their targeting data force brands to fit into their ecosystem. Growth Marketing Advisors flips that and resourcefully preserves your Core Potential to find your true audience rather than being influenced by the powerful external forces of Big Tech. Furthermore, these forces are so powerful, they can also influence your organization away from your Core Potential.
Growth Marketing Advisors distills processes, systems, and data into easy-to-read flow charts that show the most important decision points and data flows so you can actively shape the often-times hidden but most critical parts of organization so all things point toward this Core Potential and thus truly igniting inbound.
Your vision will become clearer to the world. Customers who are completely aligned and understand your approach will seek your product. With a core message that is clear to everyone, you can begin to establish yourself as a market leader and reach a larger customer base while recognizing more revenue.