I heard a conversation the other day. It was about the question, “Is there one thing that would put you into the top 0.01% of marketers, a marketing superpower?” And if so, what is it? That caught my attention right there!
This is my summary of that interview between Alex Cattoni and Shawn Twing.
(see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PPCzI25NAs) . If you get a chance to listen to either of them, do so. Inevitably you will leave it a little bit wiser.
Alex Cattoni is a copywriter, speaker, and the Founder of the Copy Posse; a global army of authentic copywriters with a passion for creating community, credibility, and conversions with nothing but powerful and precise wording. Alex has 10+ years experience in online marketing and branding.
Shawn Twing is the founder and president of Barn Door Media. He has more than two decades of experience developing, executing, optimizing, and scaling digital marketing strategies for clients large and small, building and refining a principles-based framework to do that successfully and predictably, and he has spent thousands of hours advising and teaching others how to do the same.
For Shawn, curiosity is key.
When he meets someone interesting he likes to ask:
If you look back on the entirety of your field, what are the 3 things that matter most? (or just 1 thing)
Or asking a consultant – looking back over all of your clients, what are the three things or mistakes you wish your clients would avoid? (or just 1 thing)
For the interview with Alex, he asked himself, “Is there one thing that rises above everything else from what I have done?”
For him, a critical ingredient is excitement. We want to get our prospects to be excited about what we are talking about. And we can reverse engineer that. We are taking our audience from place A to place B – and there is a tension between those 2 points.
Imagine talking enthusiastically about Star Wars, to someone who doesn’t care about Star Wars – there is no tension there, no bight. You end up faced with “Who cares?”
He goes on, talking about his process of working. When I sit down to write, I think, “where is my audience now, and where do I want to take them?” There are different time scales – within an e-mail, between multiple e-mails. And all of that fits within another A-to-B journey. For example, from Facebook (FB) ad to landing page, to opt-in page to more e-mails to the final offer. That is one long A-to-B journey, containing lots of smaller A-to-B journeys. We use the tension to pull people forward.
He recounts so many e-mails he has read over the years. You see things like, “Here is a story, and by the way I want to sell you something.” There is no tension in that copy. The copy may well have all of the technical ingredients it should, like story, open loops and hooks – but no grabbing tension.
Marketing advice is so often, “Use the story”, “Use hooks”, “Use open loops”. Absolutely sound advice. But this is only part of the picture, It is the tension we really want, and to pull a prospect forward.
A marketer who says, “Hey, here is a story, now buy my stuff” … they get it. They’re doing the right thing, but don’t really get it. You can’t resolve all of the tension in one go – then you’re done.
Ideally have open loops, and open loops all within a giant open loop.
But how do you do this?
The #1 super-power of a marketer – “We know where we are going, and they don’t”. We are in a position to engineer surprise and mystery. We are taking someone on a journey, and we know where we are going and they don’t – what a beautiful way to make something exciting for someone.
So, avoid “Hey, here is a story, here are some facts, buy my stuff”. There is no excitement there. How can you make it exciting? Maybe don’t offer it today. Maybe tell the story in component parts and the final tension is in the direction of your offer or product. Don’t try to sell in the first e-mail [ever].
You want someone, part way through your campaign, saying, “Dude, I want what you are doing, please take my money.”
He takes a wonderful wee digression, talking about a TED Talk given by Ben Zander. In it, Ben Zander explains a Chopin piece, and why it is so effective. The piece builds tension, there is an expected note, but keeps not quite hitting it. At the end, when the right note is hit, you feel, “Aaaah!”. That is what we are aiming at. “Finally, someone understands me, it makes sense now.” All those attempts in the past that didn’t work, now they know why.
(Ben Zander – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LCwI5iErE watch it [actually, watch it again every little while, it is profound]. Or read the book, “The art of possibility”, by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander)
An obvious question to wonder is - is there a process, some way of approaching this task? Yes.
Step 1 – draw out a box with A and another box with B. Where is my audience now (maybe in e-mail 3…), and where do I want to take them?
What is the main message of the e-mail?
Who cares about this? This is absolutely key to answer. It might sound trite, but ask again, “who cares?” Eventually you get to the nub of it, what really matters. This is key.
He doesn’t think of himself as ‘doing marketing’. Rather there are people whose lives could be improved by getting to know something that someone else can do for them, or can offer them. It enables you to show another person that they can do things that they did not think they could do. And to do it in a way that is genuine and caring. He does not like to sell, sell, sell. That is not his way (nor is it mine). He isn’t a seller. If he has to sell something he has done something wrong. Rather, how do I get the obvious right solution to a person’s problem in front of that person, so that it is obvious? That is marketing - or at least what marketing should be.
Alex shared an experience. She recounts starting a project to sell something. It is easy to fall back on left-brain stuff - we need this, and that and a bit more of this… then off we go. “Look at all this value, and it is only this much…” Yes, you have to have a good offer. But you have to engage with what they really care about. We come back to that primary question, “Who cares?” What is the primary answer to ‘why?’ “What would make this offer an obvious no-brainer?”
She talked about launching a high-ticket item. She sent out some good e-mails, good competent e-mails. But after a few, realised that what was holding people back actually had nothing to do with scarcity, price or value.
You need to get the A to B journey, what are they afraid of, what are their worries, what is holding them back? Marketers are typically excellent at explaining how the thing that we’ve created can get this excellent result. How to do all the things to show it makes perfect sense. People maybe don’t have any doubts that we can do it – they have doubts that they can do it. It is an emotional piece. This is often the piece that makes the difference between a good promotion and an extraordinary one. The one that speaks to what the audience is deeply fearful about.
Marketers often skip empathy and go straight to authority.
The fear people have, “I don’t think I’m good enough to be able to do this.” People have it, but won’t say it. It is not something we admit, and maybe even don’t actually voice it to ourselves. If you can both voice this and cover it for them, you’ll have a winner.
Good marketers command respect, without asking for it. Meet your audience with empathy. Shawn shared a wee story (I’m a sucker for stories.) He told the story of this person who had earned the title ‘master’, and demanded everyone use it. His father’s comment, “Son, you will meet two types of people in life – those who demand respect, and those who command respect.”
There are some figures coming out of work by Dean Jackson, an amazing digital marketer. When he analysed data from large segments of buyers, of all the people who buy over a 2 year period, only 15% buy in the first 90 days. There is four times the opportunity after the 90 days … if you don’t mess it up. There is a huge myth in marketing, “If you don’t sell right now, you won’t get the opportunity”. Simply not true. And if you do want them to buy now, you are optimising to the 15%. You will miss a huge slice.
The underlying philosophy here is “Purchases are an emergent property of relationships.”
Don’t ask, “how much will this promotion make?” Rather, ask how can we create the most value for our audience, both those who don’t buy and those who do? We want informative value, entertainment value, value for everybody. And from that, money is an emergent property. Focus on the relationship, and the sales will take care of themselves. If you only focus on the sales, you will have a hard time selling.
So, how to improve your marketing narrative? Look at serialised TV shows, like Lost, or 24, or Justified. Watch these and see how tension is used to sustain the entire series. At the end of an episode, you think, “Aaagh - I need to watch the next one!”. How many of us end up binge-watching these box-sets? Why? Because they are so good with tension. You are always wondering, how is this going to work out? Tension propels the show. You reach a resolution at the end of a season. And then the next season it happens all over again. These skills are learnable. Watch it, one you like. And analyse it – what is going on? Why does it pull you?
The big marketing superpower? Sustain and amplify tension. Commonly 10-15% of campaigns work spectacularly and 10-15% fail spectacularly. The rest muddle through, with tweaks and honing. When looking back on his career, Shawn admits, about half the campaigns fail.
If he strips away everything else in the offers that did well, the difference was being able to sustain and amplify tension. Yes, you have to capture attention first. And marketers are often good at really good headlines, and attention grabbers. But once the interest is gone, your 100,000 leads are not worth much. It is not the getting the attention, not just the sustaining attention, it is the pulling it forward, it is the turning it up.
For example, “Hands up, who is interested in X”, Yep - great, now let’s go on a journey. Now you ramp tensions up and resolve it, ramp it again, and resolve it…
A common thing you hear is, “People’s attention span is so short these days.” No – people sit for hours glued to Netflix. It isn’t a lack of attention. The issue is how to sustain attention. Capturing attention is easy. Holding it and ramping it up is not so easy. Just capturing it misses the point. I don’t want “a click”, I want a customer in a year from now who has bought all of my stuff.
He uses only one metric to build his business, “happy customers”.
So much wisdom shared in this little extract. How do your marketing activities compare?
If you'd like to discus anything in more depth, please contact me.
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