Why modern marketing doesn’t have to be about data, scale or automation

If you know the book/logo above (not this one ??), you might know what I’m writing about. If not, keep reading.

I recently read “This won’t scale” by the Drift Marketing team. In a few words — a big wake up call for all funnel/data/analytics-driven marketers like me. Below my top takeaways.

1. Start marketing before selling ??

Don’t wait until your product looks like Apple’s to start marketing. Find your wedge within your target market, do your homework, and build your audience early, one email at a time. “Fight hand to hand” for them, and if you really need to care about one thing, it’d be to make people care.

Pixel perfection is a mirage, it doesn’t exist and is likely to have zero impact if your business/audience is not yet mainstream. Before even thinking of building a product, build an audience.

At the end of the day, it’s not about you or your product— it’s about your customers, and it’ll always be.

2. Optimise for conversations, not conversions ??

Martech tools made us too excited about scale and automation, contacts and MQLs, so marketers shifted their focus. As a results, some companies started treating people as leads instead of people. It’s conversations that drive the business. After all, a sale doesn’t get made until a conversation happens.

This has happened everywhere I worked to date — super relevant to my experience.

Having a direct,  ongoing hotline with your customers is among the biggest investments you can make to lay the foundations of growth everywhere else. Just start early.

3. Obsess over experience, not data ??

While data can be very useful, it can also be very dangerous, as it’s inherently backward looking. If you become data-centric, you forget to become customer-centric, and seemingly unscalable things that can lead to growth can get crossed out. By talking to people instead of staring at spreadsheets, you can actually learn what your customers care about.

Another huge wake-up call. Previous performance is no good indication of future performance, and as much as I love it, data will just tell you what’s happening, not why.

Get outside of the building, you’ll learn things that no spreadsheet will ever teach you. Do it regularly.

4. Bet on brand, bet on being yourself ??

Your brand is the combined experiences a person has when they interact with your product and your company, that “emotional moat” that makes them wanting to work with you instead of a competitor. Because people never changed, the best way to win customers and build a brand is to be human. To be real. To be authentic. Be you. Don’t be afraid of exposing your flaws.

Get rid of fancy email templates and stock images, and rather show your face in the most genuine and human way possible — real video, images from your team, and plain emails with a P.S. No need for a studio or crew.

5. Make marketing everyone’s job ??

Hard truth: no one in your company cares about marketing because too often few understand its value. Biggest task as marketers is to share our work with the wider team. And that’s exactly what internal marketing is all about: getting in front of people and explaining why what we do matters, and what they can do to help. Because at the end of the day, if you can’t get the people inside of your company to believe your message, how will you convince outsiders?

You can blame it on the on culture, on the leadership, on the product, but the reality is that this is on marketers and marketers only.

Exciting your teammates about marketing is the same as exciting your customers about your product. Make them care.

6. Master the timeless lessons ??

There will always be a new hack to figure out, that stuff comes and goes. But there’s one thing that has never changed in marketing: people. Focus on the timeless lessons and really dig in and understand copywriting, human behaviour and social triggers. If you want to invest in your professional future and your company’s success, study the classics, not the tips n’ tricks.

Another application of the 80/20 rule.

80% of your learnings/successes is likely to come from mastering the most timeless books and agnostic frameworks. Tips, tricks and hacks are juct clickbait.

7. Write like you talk ??

People have short attention and no patience. If they don’t understand something immediately, they move on. Care more about being understood rather than having perfect grammar. No need to necessarily be witty or well versed, your customers won’t really care. When you write something, simply get people to understand what you’re saying, why it’s important (meaning how it affects them) and what you can do about it.

In Rome we say something similar:  “Parla come magni”?? (lit. “Speak the way you eat”). Meaning, talk straight.

Even better, write like your audience talk. A great example of this school of thoughts in Monzo’s tone of voice doc.

8. Create a movement on top of your category ??

Your category can’t just be about your company, it’s got to be about something bigger. Choose your cause (ie. “the end of software” for Salesforce) that revolves around a shared enemy (ie. clunky software, on-premise servers and annual contracts), and build a real content doctrine around it.

Don’t forget to welcome your competitors in. Guess why Uber grew its valuation from ￡300M in Feb ‘12 to ￡3B in Aug ‘13? (Lyft launched in Jun ‘12).

This is some insight, but there’s (a lot) more. Link to the book here.

You can get a hardcopy for free but if you are impatient (like me), you can email the Drift team and they’ll send you the PDF.

Thanks to fabri for sharing the book with me and big shoutout to Drift marketing team for writing it— keep them coming, folks ??

PS. If you’ve read the book, please share your top lessons below. ??

PSS. If you liked what you read, please give it a clap here.