Headlines and the value proposition

headlines, marketing No Responses »
Sep 302011

You might know what you do, but does the customer?

It’s sometimes hard to explain your business to a new customer, and that’s a problem.

Entrepreneurs may offer a new type of service or a new product that people aren’t familiar with. But more often, they simply haven’t sat down and really analysed their purpose – what they’re doing, what’s in it for the customer, and what makes them different.

In other words, they haven’t worked out their value proposition.

So people often hesitate when they try to describe what they do. But customers are impatient and don’t like to waste time hunting for clues as to whether or not a business is a match.

Customers and investors may give them a second chance and enough time to explain, because the elevator pitch isn’t always as urgent as it’s portrayed.

You have around 3 seconds to get your message across on the web before visitors start itching to leave your site. So it’s vital to express your promise or value proposition quickly and clearly.

What not to do

Here are five mistakes businesses often make with their value propositions online:

  • They tell the visitor who they are then bury the pitch in a lot of text below
  • They say what they do, alright, and leave it at that. The customer wonders why he should care
  • Their value proposition isn’t expressed clearly, so customers don’t understand what they’re all about
  • They make a persuasive value proposition but pitch it to the wrong audience
  • Above all, they simply don’t show what value they offer, and in a few seconds the customer’s gone, probably to do business with the competition.

Why headlines count

Write an effective headline on your home page and you’re half way to successfully communicating your value proposition in those valuable few seconds you’re allotted. You’re also well on the way to avoiding the mistakes above.

A headline will show what you do, who you do it for, and what value (or benefits) you promise. It should be brief, because people are impatient. It should be clear and packed with nouns not adjectives.

In some cases it helps to explain who your target customer is. If you’re a marketing agency working with small businesses in Wisconsin, tell the reader. If you make cars and deal with a wide range of customers, there are other ways to signal your target audience (a picture of a car wouldn’t hurt).

Headlines count because they’re the quickest way to get a customer thinking “I know what this business does, who they do it for and why they’re better than the competition”. And that knowledge takes them one step further to conversion.

Posted by David at 3:48 pm

Hard words

language, marketing, writing No Responses »
Sep 172011

Marcia Yudkin’s weekly marketing email is always a good read. This week she gave a useful reminder of the value of hard words.

Compare these two pitches:

A. Learn all the latest success strategies for blogs.

B. Turn your blog into a “must-read” for your industry, bringing you steady client leads.

Sentence B has far more power. Whereas sentence A promises more knowledge stuffed into your head, B talks about real-world results.

Hard words engage your readers and hold their attention more effectively. When you’re leading your audience across a river, hard words are the stepping stones you should use.

The hardest words are things you can point to in real life – car, insect, battlefield and client leads. The softest words, giving the mind least purchase, are distant, soggy abstractions – education, capitalism, happiness, success strategies. They’re common in academia and philosophy, as this example shows:

The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.

Metaphor is one way of importing hardness and bridging the gap between abstraction and the real world. Shakespeare’s plays teem with metaphors, and he constantly brings us directly, sometimes shockingly, back to lived experience.

This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind:
Sometime the flood prevails, and then the wind;

Revising your work is an opportunity to cut out soft words and increase density, but it’s not always easy. No wonder Pascal (allegedly) wrote “I apologize that this letter is so long – I lacked the time to make it short.”

A marketing baseline or promise is one of the hardest things to write, but it’s easier when you aim to eliminate everything except the real-world results Marcia mentions in her email.

Posted by David at 9:54 am

Online learning doesn’t humiliate students enough

content strategy, elearning No Responses »
Sep 122011

There’s a meme going around that online learning is about to destroy the university.

It goes roughly like this:

    1. University has always been the best place to learn stuff.

    2. But things like Wikipedia and Kindle have dramatically reduced the barriers to learning stuff outside university.

    3. Therefore it’s now cheaper and less time-consuming to learn stuff online, and the days of the university are numbered.

In this vein, Matt Yglesias claims that “American universities are headed for a newspaper-style, technologically-induced giant collapse at some point in the not-to-distant future”

And it’s true that people are learning all sorts of stuff online. The Khan Academy is an enormously popular set of lessons in basic maths topics and a platform teachers can use to identify and tackle pupil weaknesses. The Floating University has just been launched, offering access to lectures by Steven Pinker and Joel Cohen. Even Carol Vorderman has a startup offering online maths lessons.

These ventures are wonderful. They’re opening minds to new ideas and topics, lowering the cost of learning, and will likely have all sorts of unforeseen benefits.

But they may be lacking something. Consider this story about how Ernest Gellner tackled Brendan O’Leary’s doctoral thesis.

“He began the viva by warmly congratulating me… Naturally I felt elated. But then he counselled me that he had one minor obligation to perform: he was required (in the manner of Karl Popper) to test whether he could falsify the thesis that I had written for the dissertation. A chill ran down my recently elated spine. He then performed his duty, corrected my errors, and gave me salutary advice on matters philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, historical and sociological. Lastly he presented me with about 20 pages of typed commentary, amounting to an article in response to my efforts. In short, he demonstrated generosity, utterly professional social scientific standards and astounding scholarly range.”

Online learning as communication of knowledge may never offer the challenge of falsification as efficiently as offline learning.

Prof Yglesias’s statement that “A college, or a law school, is basically supposed to be conveying information to people” seems to put unnecessary limits on education.

Schools and universities aren’t village wells

From Cardinal Newman to Michael Oakeshott, people have agreed that universities aren’t just there to communicate facts and then check they’re in your head. You don’t follow a degree course as if you’re gathering water from the village well. Oakeshott says “A university will have ceased to exist when … its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of an undergraduate’s time”1.

There’s something more to education. For example, Oxford University’s tutorial system is designed to give an important extra dimension to education beyond conveying information to people. A weekly tutorial gathers a small number of undergraduates to discuss and analyse hypotheses, defend them, criticise and attempt to falsify them.

Will Moore describes the tutorial like this: “Its function is not to instruct: it is to set the student the task of expressing his thought articulately, and then to assist him in subjecting his creation to critical examination”. The tutorial system is “a sceptical method, a method that inquires, probes, scrutinises. It is not at its best in ex cathedra authoritative statement, but in criticism, theory, analysis, comparison.”

Short term humiliation for long term confidence

The tutorial system has some of the features of the Socratic system. From the student’s point of view, it can be both immensely frustrating – even humiliating – in the short term, and rewarding in the long term. The tutor is irritatingly unassailable because he or she rarely tenders a position that can be attacked. The burden is mostly on the student.

A fair portion of Plato’s dialogues consists of people getting irritated with Socrates’s constant questions and challenges.

It’s not impossible to replicate some of the effects of this system. Writing can be an internal dialogue if you learn to have a (good) imp on your shoulder constantly asking “is that actually true?” as you write. Reading critically can have a similar effect.

But training that imp independently isn’t necessarily the most efficient path to critical thought. Learning to think just by thinking is a long hard road. It doesn’t quickly reveal to you that other people can be right despite first appearances suggesting that they’re obviously wrong, stubborn and stupid. And it doesn’t teach you to defend and criticise out loud and inter vivos.

Buddhism has its masters. Business has its mentors. Brendan O’Leary had his Ernest Gellner. Does online learning have or need its own equivalent?

1. The Tutorial System (Word document, 560Kb) ^

Posted by David at 11:21 am

Do companies need a Chief Curation Officer?

browsing, content strategy, curation No Responses »
Sep 072011

Now that content is so important to the conversation between businesses and customers, should businesses be hiring somebody to pick out the best content on their websites?

After all, curation is the latest great thing. It seems to solve the problem that in some contexts, search is just too machiney. For example, Felix Salmon has just joined the ranks of curators with the launch of counterparties.com, “a curated snapshot of the best finance news and commentary”.

Of course, counterparties has existed for a good long time as a regular feature on Felix’s blog, but this launch on a separate domain represents a formalisation of the principle.

Herding sheep

From the point of view of news and content strategy, Counterparties is interesting because it’s neither fully human-powered nor chosen by algorithm. Instead, it combines both – the wisdom of crowds anchored by good old-fashioned human judgement about what’s interesting. Think of it as a shepherd (Felix) rounding up the content sheep using an intelligent sheepdog (the algorithm).

Counterparties combines our own judgment — what we find interesting, overlooked and important — with the recommendation engine created by our friends at Percolate.

The site joins other important curation sites such as The Browser and Brainpickings. They’re an answer to the problem of serendipity, which search generally fails to provide.

Laura Larsell sums up the problem:

“search” works best when you have a pretty good sense of what you are looking for. But most people, most of the time, do not have concrete ideas of what they really want.

Why U No Browse?

Is that true for your average commercial website? It’s debatable. There’s a strong case for organising content around the tasks people want to achieve when they arrive on your website: I want to buy a coffee machine; how do I apply for this course; what vegetarian options does the restaurant offer… and so on.

Browsing isn’t much use in that sort of task-orientated process. If anything, it’s a distraction. But Laura points out that companies like Amazon and Netflix already encourage serendipitous discovery by means of widgets that tell you what other people bought and what they list as great books and films.

With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine ways an imaginary Chief Curation Officer might encourage browsing. A travel company might pick an interesting destination to highlight (indeed, this already happens on sites such as tripadvisor.com). An intranet manager might select best practice case studies or interesting quotes culled by the sales department from conversations with the customer. A bike shop might feature a video showing how to tackle the local downhill race course. And a university site might feature great ideas that appear in its undergraduate physics (or philosophy, or medicine) course.

Posted by David at 8:42 am
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