#25 Weekly Dan — Marketing Simplification
Cheap products, your weaknesses, and wild ideas
Hello there
This is the #25 issue of Weekly Dan.
Welcome to 29 new people who have joined this week. You are nice.
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Every Friday, I share 5 golden nuggets with you:
One Personal Insight
One Marketing Tactic
One Long-term Trend
One Thought-provoking Question
One Great Resource
Let’s get going.
Personal Insight 🤯
People don't buy the cheapest product.
They buy the best product they can afford.
Assuming that customers buy products based solely on the price is the worst mindset a Founder can have.
In this scenario, everyone eats canned ham, wears the same white T-shirt, and drives a Honda Civic. Hopefully, it’s not the case.
Benedict Evans found that people use the adjective “best” more and more in comparison to “cheap” when searching for new products.
People are tired of products that are cheaper but don't deliver. They want the best product for their job. But everyone's wallet is different.
Some people spend $10 per month on productivity tools, while others have $500. But both segments need a high-quality product to solve their problem.
So, don’t chase the lowest price. Chase the best audience you want to work with.
Marketing Tactic 🧭
2023 is soon.
You can spend it executing wild ideas or optimizing boring stuff.
I hope the choice is obvious.
Dedicate one day in November to creativity. Your goal is to brainstorm as many marketing and product ideas for 2023 as possible.
No need for prioritization or roadmaps. Just a list of your wildest ideas.
Here are four questions to navigate you through this exercise:
What products would be interesting to launch?
How can you promote your products in a cool way?
How can you dramatically grow your online audience?
What skills would you love to master?
You will have more ideas in December. Just add them to the list.
This way, you will be 100% prepared to nail your 2023.
Long-term Trend 🛸
Marketing funnel simplification
Justin Welsh wrote a great issue about marketing funnels for Digital Creators.
In a nutshell, he advises simplifying the marketing funnel. It’s better to charge upfront than to have 2 marketing freebies and lose all potential customers along the way.
The era of complex marketing funnels is coming to an end. At least for Indie Entrepreneurs and Creators. Here are a few reasons why:
Everyone knows it’s a marketing funnel. You could impress customers with your genius lead magnet 10 years ago. Now they are prepared for a “definitely not automated” email sequence with a “definitely not a fake” discount. More and more people ignore these tactics because they’ve seen them 100 times already.
Free stuff attracts users who love free stuff. So if you tweet about free tools and run giveaways every week, you will get followers who love this kind of content. And do you know what these users hate to do? Paying for digital products.
Too complex to manage. The more steps your marketing funnel has, the more metrics can break. A marketing department could probably handle it. But a one-person business needs simplicity.
Of course, Creators will still give away some content for free. For example, this free newsletter works as a trust builder for me.
But your marketing funnels should be easier. Both for you and your users.
Here’s how to do it:
Change your free plan to a free trial
Limit your free trial to 7 days
Charge money (<$10) for your lead magnets
Let people pay for your product as early as possible
Build trust in your acquisition channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Newsletter)
The more control you have, the better decision you will make.
Thought-provoking Question 🔋
What weakness does your product have?
Founders know their product’s strengths because they promote them.
But every product (no matter how good it is) has its weaknesses. Each solution has drawbacks that customers need to accept.
Some of the weaknesses are deal-breakers for users. If a video player doesn’t have a Full HD resolution, it’s doomed in 2022.
Others are purchase objections. You can still handle them and get a new paying customer. If a website builder lacks advanced analytics, it can highlight integrations with Google Analytics to persuade a potential customer.
And finally, some of them are improvement opportunities. You can build a new feature (or even a product) to solve this problem and grow faster. If someone from Notion is reading my newsletter, this is high time for an offline mode.
So here’s the bottom line:
List all weaknesses your product has
Check if you have any deal-breakers for your target audience
Handle purchase objections in your marketing funnel better
Prioritize improvement opportunities for December
This is a stupidly simple exercise. But its value is off the charts.
Great Resource 🏈
I am doing market research for my course “Positioning that sells”. And it means reading many articles on positioning, messaging, and branding.
As expected, most of them are useless. Content marketers describe the same positioning statement over and over again. And everyone mentions Apple.
But one blog is pure gold. Of course, I am talking about April Dunford. She wrote “Obviously Awesome”, the Bible of product positioning.
Here are three excellent articles from her blog:
How Context can Transform Your Product (❤️ my favorite)
It’s a free masterclass.
That’s it!
Mind to give me some feedback?
See you on Tuesday 👋
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