The other I posed this somewhat trick laden question on Twitter – “Is making something easier to understand dumming it down or smartening it up?” The answers I got were mixed. Some obviously saw that I was suggesting it’s actually harder to make some easy to understand. Others clearly felt that it somewhat of a disservice to try to make things that were complicated seem simple.
That, in a nutshell, is why simple is so hard. As any regular Twitter user will tell you, you have to work sometimes to get your point across in 140 characters, but the real demon is that we feel the need to make things sound more important than they are or to demonstrate in verbose ways how much, in fact, we know about something that others don’t. I can’t tell you how many times the editor of my book suggested that I needed to utilize use simpler language.
The problem with simple is that it actually takes more work. I often quote Mark Twain here – “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter . . .”
The most successful companies I know have been able to boil down what they do, what they stand for, what they are trying to do, how they are unique, or the innovation that will rock your world into one succinct and memorable phrase, and that’s the magic. Earnest Hemingway is considered by many to be one of the greatest American writers of all time. It is widely known that one his most famous traits was the use of short sentences. I’ll defer to Copyblogger’s Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well to act as a resource for this idea.
When I was creating the Duct Tape Marketing system for my small business clients I started off with something that was far more dense than the 7 simple steps that exist today. The paring down was all done by my clients that wanted something simple and doable. That lesson is a central filter for everything I do, but it’s still a challenge.
Open your business up and ask yourself how you could land on one easy to understand and communicate thing that you stand for. One simple, single purpose for doing what you do. One audacious innovation that takes people’s breath away. Don’t complicate it, no matter how trivial it feels. Turn to a 6 year old and ask them what you do and pay close attention to the answer because it’s probably not draped in the mask of importance that we so seem to cling to. Simple has far more value than complex, try it on and see how it feels.
I’m writing a series of posts over at Colourlovers for HP and what follows below is an excerpt from today’s post. I’m also doing some fun video interviews with real small business called Local Color.
So often content producers have no real plan. If they write a blog they simply decide that day what they plan to write. First off, this makes the writing process more difficult and makes repurposing much harder.
Effective reuse comes from planned reuse. The best tip I can give you is to sit down once a month or so and create an editorial calendar. This allows you to create some goals, but it also allows you to think big picture about what needs to be written to create a body of work that will have multiple uses.
You can always slip hot topics into your calendar on the fly, but you’ll find that if you do keyword research for your industry and use that list for topic focus, you’ll get far more bang for what you write and you won’t feel nearly as much pressure always trying to come up with topics.
I’m going to continue another day or two on this idea of commitment. Forgive me if you find it tedious, but it’s a really big, really important topic and I think it will lead somewhere helpful – I started with the Evolution of Commitment and A Convenient Truth.
Getting people to commit to spending money with your firm, and perhaps equally as important commit to returning to spend money, commit to passing your message and telling your story, and commit to referring your products and services, has become more complex in this everything is free, information overload world we find ourselves in.
Today I want to explore another prime driver of commitment – Inspiration. While we will go out of our way for an experience that’s convenient, we will mortgage our assets for an experience that inspires. Inspiration is so thoroughly lacking in most of our daily lives that when we find it, be it in a person, innovation, or organization, we get committed to keeping it.
It would be very easy to cite a company like Apple as a great example of an organization that inspires loyalty and commitment, but that’s just too easy. I’d like to share a couple examples that to me feel more personal in nature.
Seth Godin in quite possibly the most popular marketing blogger and author of the day. His readers are committed to helping him succeed. When Seth mentioned my new book in a blog post about referrals, several hundred people ran out and bought the book. Mind you this was not a review, it was a one sentence mention. I read Seth’s books and I enjoy them. But, and I hope this doesn’t come off wrong, I don’t always implement new strategies and tactics I find in those books. What Seth’s books do, in fact what all of Seth’s 300 word or less blog posts do, is inspire me. I always come away feeling better for having taken the time to visit and that, I believe, is one of the secrets to the success of brand Seth.
Inside the Threadless Office – Image borrowed from Guy Kawasaki
Threadless makes t-shirts, but there’s nothing too inspiring about that. The thing is Threadless makes the coolest t-shirts in the coolest way. The designs, promotion and most likely a great deal of the marketing is done by the customers. The image above taken from inside their Chicago headquarters gives some feel for why the employees are inspired by working in a playground setting. Threadless inspires by taking advantage of the Internet’s two-way nature to involve customers in the process of creating their product. This innovation inspires profits, customers and competitors alike.
37Signals boasts over 5 million users to online services with a ton of competitors. The company’s customers are fanatical in their support because the software does just what it’s suppose to do and little more – that’s an inspiring idea. The company inspires through simple ideas and incredible design. People are drawn to the almost counter intuitive innovation that holds on dearly to simplicity. The organization lives these beliefs and has been profitable from day one.
Useful is forever. Bells and whistles wear off, but usefulness never does. We build useful software.
Our customers are our investors. They fund our daily operations by paying for our products. We answer to them, not outside investors or the stock market.
Clarity is king. Buzzwords, lingo, and sensationalized marketing-speak have no place at 37signals.
If you or organization does nothing that inspires, no simple concept, no incredible design, no earth shattering experience, no commitment to an idea, no story that attracts – how will people commit?
Last week I wrote a post on a subject I’ve been fascinated with of late called the Evolution of Commitment. The general idea of the post was to suggest that with all of this free information and free versions of products available it’s become more challenging to get someone to commit to your offering. I asked readers to tell me what gets them to pull out their wallet and commit and several themes arose.
One word that came up time and time again was convenience. It does seem that people will spend their last dime to get something that makes life easier, more convenient, and that’s something marketers must factor into every aspect of their business. It’s not always the best product that wins. Often it’s a good product that is easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to acquire that wins.
We often get stuck running our business in a ways that are most convenient for us and not so much for the very people we need to attract – customers. Some of the greatest innovations available today reside in making something – a product, service or entire industry – more convenient.
Convenient business
Take a look at all of the ways a prospect could find you and contact you. Are your contact details on every page of your web site? Do you have outposts in places like Facebook? Are your local search engine profiles enhanced with useful information? Do you offer multiple forms of contact – email, web form, click to call, IM? Can prospects get additional information without having to pick up the phone?
Convenient products and services
Do you have versions of your products and services tailored to every size and budget? Do you have trial offerings? Do you offer automated training to help customers get the most from your offerings? Do you give access to your products and services in ways that prospects want them – smart phone, online, offline, iPad, iPod?
Convenient delivery
No matter what your product or service you can always find new ways to give customers the ability to acquire it on their own terms. This is an area where growing use of the mobile device is just begging for innovation. I’ve been offering my podcast free of charge for years. Recently, I created a iPhone app for the podcast that’s available for $2.99. While the same information is available for free, hundreds choose to download and pay for the app for the convenience of getting the content delivered the way they want it.
Convenient message
This is a tricky one. If it’s hard to understand what you do that’s unique, what you stand for, why I must have what you offer, there’s going to be convenience friction. One of the best innovations in this area lies in paring your message down to the simplest terms possible.
Consider this About Us message from software service provider 37 Signals as a fine example of a convenient message – “We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many promises. Instead, we build simpler web-based software with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features you’ll actually use.”
While I think most would consider this an obvious topic, it’s not always an easy one to put into practice. What a customer thinks is convenience may not be what we think it is. In fact, it’s often hard for customers to tell us what it is. You’ve got to experiment and constantly push everyone in your organization to consider innovation through convenience.
My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.
I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.
Email service provider Exact Target has been doing some very valuable research of late called SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, & FOLLOWERS. More importantly, I guess, is that they have been sharing this research and I think you should go grab this fascinating read.
Below is a pretty cool interactive tool that introduces us to the 12 distinct consumer personas they turned up online. Studying this kind of behavior allows you to get to know your audience based on their personalities, not just their demographics.
Most of us want to sell something – want to get people to commit to plopping down the hard won cash in an exchange of value. That’s certainly one of the reasons millions of business folks have jumped into online networks and social platforms – to gain access to the hundreds of millions that hang out there and prospect for customers.
But while social technology has made it much easier to gain access to people, I think in some ways it’s actually made it harder to get those same people to commit to buy (or at least it hasn’t really made it easier.) While selling in the old days (2 years ago) was still very much about getting someone’s attention and making them an offer, it has now become much more of an intentional act of gaining trust and helping prospects evolve towards a customer commitment.
The Evolution of Commitment looks a bit like this:
It’s pretty darn easy to get a fan or a follower, but what’s that really worth by itself?
Using social media platforms to drive fans and followers to read your educational content furthers their engagement
Encouraging that reader to subscribe to your email newsletter or how to series is the link to gaining permission to make offers
Creating opportunities for subscribers to participate by evaluating, sampling and trialing your products and services is the key to demonstrating value worth paying for.
And finally now you’ve got them hooked and it’s time to pay up – but wait, why would I pay for something I can get for free in so many other places?
The response in the last point above is the dilemma of the free online world that people have grown accustomed to. Scads of smart marketers have mastered the pre commitment dance of know, like and trust, only to fall flat when asking for the ultimate commitment – money.
So what does it take to get fans and followers to commit, take the act of paying for your offerings?
I asked some of my followers on Twitter that very question and receive responses like: “there needs to have been serious “can’t live without” value on the free version that would make me test out the paid version.”
“the idea that what i’m paying for has real life value, isn’t free somewhere else, or won’t lose half it’s value in < 1yr."
"add'l features get me from free to paid, as does a great free experience."
"It has to inspire me, be enjoyable and/or fulfill a true need."
As I look around at some of the successful freemium models, Basecamp, Evernote, and those that have experience challenges going to a paid model, Ning, I’m struck with the impression that commitment comes from an experience that so exceeds expectation, so motivates people to talk, and is so valuable that people actually feel bad not paying for the experience or come to understand their life will be better by making the commitment.
That’s a pretty high standard, but the clear message is this – people will buy anything that’s free, even crap, but they won’t commit unless it’s remarkably free and freeing.
But think about that for a moment – isn’t there a similar bar for any commitment? What gets someone to say yes to a marriage proposal? What gets someone to commit to giving up smoking? What gets someone to go after a job at a company with no current opening?
Commitment, and it’s semi-evil twin non-commitment, is all around us every day. What can we learn from it to bring to our business, culture and marketing? I think there is much to explore on this topic.
Thankfully my newest book, The Referral Engine, has met with enthusiastic support. The book offers a road map for how any size business today can go about building a marketing machine based on deserving and attracting referrals. As many reviewers have pointed out, it’s a pretty darn powerful and enjoyable way to build a business.
Unfortunately, many people read books and get lots of great ideas, but have trouble implementing the ideas. The book ends with a workshop chapter that outlines the action steps you can take to build your own referral engine, but I’ve also taken the additional step of building a course that guides you even further than the book and provides the forms, examples and resources you need to bring the book’s content to life in you business. Now, with the help of the Referral Engine Pro course this is a book you can do.
The video below is an archive of an online seminar conducted July 6th that covers many of the core ideas presented in both The Referral Engine book and Referral Engine Pro course.
Duct Tape System - Complete small business marketing system in 14 workbooks and 4 audio CDs.
Marketing Plan Pro powered by Duct Tape Marketing
The Duct Tape Marketing System now comes as Marketing Planning Software. We teamed up with Palo Alto Software, the makers of Business Plan Pro, to bring you the most powerful small business marketing plan tool going. More info here . . .
Referral Flood by John Jantsch
Referral Flood - How to create a flood of new business without spending one dime on advertising - by John Jantsch
The other I posed this somewhat trick laden question on Twitter – “Is making something easier to understand dumming it down or smartening it up?” The answers I got were mixed. Some obviously saw that I was suggesting it’s actually harder to make some easy to understand. Others clearly felt that it somewhat of a disservice to try to make things that were complicated seem simple.
Last week I wrote a post on a subject I’ve been fascinated with of late called the 
Thankfully my newest book, 
