Can Your Marketing Pass the WIIFM Test?

Welcome to my newsletter. Thanks for being here.

Grab a chair, but don’t get too comfy. We’re all busy people, so I’ll try to keep these editions short.

(Emphasis on “try.” There’s a reason I prefer to write long-form content. As Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time for a short letter, so I wrote a long one.” He’s my hero.)

So, why WIIFM Marketing? Because we, marketers, have a problem. Especially in B2B tech.

Many of us in B2B technology marketing have a little crush on the products and companies we promote. After all, if we didn’t feel enthused about them, we would probably hate our job. (Sorry, just being real here).

And herein lies the problem.

This little love affair can cause us to fawn over all the bells and whistles that make these products the best invention since sliced bread.

Now, I don’t have any experience with love affairs to definitively say they’re bad for our marketing content.

But I do have 20-ish years of helping numerous marketing teams with campaigns. Which qualifies me to say this: Far too much marketing is the result of navel-gazing. We love those bells and whistles — and it shows.

A byproduct of this navel-gazing is irrelevant content that doesn’t answer the most basic question for the audience: What’s in it for me?

Hence WIIFM Marketing.

Can your content pass the WIIFM test?

“What’s in it for me” marketing is about selling outcomes (solutions to people’s problems) rather than selling widgets (features and capabilities that make your product the best in the universe, allegedly).

Yes, many buyers and decision-makers care about the functional aspects of the product, especially technical buyers.

But ultimately, they’re just busy people with real problems and pain points. What they truly want to know is how your product will solve those problems.

It’s hard to convey how you’re solving a problem if your content is all about features rather than benefits — and I guarantee it, that’s the type of content you’ll get if you’re not using the WIIFM test.

I came into marketing from the journalism side. (Back when I graduated from J-school, print ruled, and going to the public relations side was a sin. Marketing, I imagine, would have meant total banishment. But I digress.) As journalists, we were trained to ensure every story answered the question, “Why should the reader care?”

As a marketer, you can take a page from J-school by asking these three questions for every asset you’re releasing into the world:

1.???? Does your content relate to actual people?

Since B2B marketing targets business customers, it’s easy to forget that your buyers are people. Not entities. Whether you’re discussing general ideas or specific solutions, you’re not trying to appeal to an organization. Or, worse, to an entire sector.

Your goal is to convey how your idea or product will make life easier for the [insert persona here].

2.???? Have you connected the dots between your latest and greatest capabilities or improvements and the audience’s desired outcomes?

They don’t care how you’re addressing a market gap. They don’t care how your team innovated to get to this new release. They just want to know what results to expect if they buy in.

And — most importantly — they want to know this by reading plain language. They don’t have time to treasure-hunt for information hidden among a bunch of jargon and platitudes.

3.???? Is the [reinsert persona here] getting any real value from this content?

Here’s your chance to shine as the market leader. Provide fresh insights rather than joining the “me too” chorus.

And BTW, if you want insightful content, you may need a human to write it.

ChatGPT and its many cousins have a great place in marketing (more on this later). But in many cases, recycled and regurgitated ideas just aren’t going to get the job done. For those cases, you’re better off with a writer using brain cells rather than algorithms.

The takeaway for all us marketers: If our content doesn’t pass the WIIFM test, we’re wasting our resources and our audience’s time. Both are limited. Let’s not squander them.