Marketing
There are three marketing stages:
1. Activities to evolve satisfied customers into passionate ones.
2. Activities to automate moving customers through the conversion funnel.
3. Activities geared to get people into the top of your funnel.
You want to learn, optimize, and relentlessly execute the tactics in the preceding order.
When Steve Blank took over marketing at a floundering SuperMac, he discovered “10,000 unprocessed, unlooked at, and untouched [product] registration cards.”8
His staff of marketing professionals had no clue who their customers were. They came to the office every day, worked on stuff 40+ hours per week. Likely they had periodic job-performance reviews, which measured productivity in some way, but they had no clue how to align their activities with what would push the company forward.
Blank: “It dawned on me that we had a department full of people who were confusing their titles with what contribution they were supposed to be making to the company.”
Titles are not the same thing as your job. Marketing people must relentlessly pursue tactics to create passion and value, move customers through the conversion funnel, and then, when the company is ready, fill the top of the funnel.
Passionate
As we’ve discussed, achieving customer satisfaction is not enough. Businesses cannot achieve significant growth rates on product satisfaction alone. In truly disruptive endeavors, the fact the product exists is, in itself, so radically new, so radically pleasure-inducing or problem-solving, so radically valuable that users are passionate just because of the MVP. This is rare.
In most endeavors, whether in an existing company seeking to regain passion or a startup needing to induce passion for the first time, something extraordinary, above and beyond—often outside the product—needs to occur.
To measure this, you need to create your own custom passion metric, which might be some combination of the following:
Net Promoter Score measures passion by asking customers their likelihood of referring the products to others. Generally, customers will only share products with others if they’re passionate about them. Otherwise, they risk their own reputation. The MustHaveScore provocatively asks your customers, “If the product were no longer available, how disappointed will you be?” Informal evidence suggests that if 40 to 50 percent of your customers would be very disappointed, you have a passionate customer base.
High scores on third-party review sites like Yelp might indicate user passion. Sometimes reviewers just want to show off, but there’s currency involved when a user takes the time to tell the world they love your product. Again, their reputation is at stake.
Other indications your users are passionate include:
A pattern that emerges around adamant feature requests or urgent bug-fix requests emanating from a particular segment around specific functionality. Customers don’t complain about a product they don’t care about. They ignore it. They complain when they feel ripped off—in other words there’s a real problem to solve, but you didn’t even get close to resolving it. Or they complain if you’re oh so close to making something truly valuable. “If only you would . . . !”
When you call to speak with them, they are excited to talk to you. As Dave McClure says, you want them to love you or hate you. Either way, they’re probably willing to say so. Love and hate come from the same place: expectations. If you promise A and deliver A above and beyond the call of duty, customers expecting A love you. If you promise A and deliver B above and beyond the call of duty, customers expecting A hate you.
When customers are willing to go public with testimonials, press releases, or case studies. This is typically a significant currency and may require extra concessions.
When customers invite their friends. If users forward your e-mail newsletters to colleagues or use product functionality to upload all their contacts to your site, or share coupons, and so forth, these are pretty good indications that you’ve gone beyond merely satisfying customers.
Benefits are realized. This is difficult to measure and often difficult to achieve via any specific activity.
Brand loyalty, such as repeat transactions or cross-selling at high margin.
Effusive praise and sharing on social media.
It’s the marketer’s job to not only understand these, but to come up with activities that motivate customers to act on their passion. E-mail campaigns, product features, personal outreach, and developing deep relationships help customers understand and appreciate the benefits and allow you to tell success stories.
You have to ask for references and case studies. You give rewards to those who refer others. You create philanthropy projects because your customers care. You create community, or a tribe, or a cult. The key is to make your customers your best marketers.
Creating passion is where your brand comes into play. Everything about your customer’s experience with business and its products affects customer perception of the brand. People can be merely satisfied with the product yet passionate about the brand. Customers will often not self-identify as passionate, yet behave as if they are.