The three secrets of marketing

There’s been a lot of talk over the last year about marketing to your community by becoming part of your community, by creating a conversation. Tara Hunt calls this “pinko” marketing. And I think it’s great. It makes you figure out who you are and who you’re going after. It puts the focus on contributing to your community, and not just on selling to them. However, creating a conversation won’t help you one twit if you aren’t telling a good story. Guy Kawasaki’s recent “10 questions” interview with Seth Godin got me to thinking about how important telling a story can be. As Seth puts it …

“I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.”

Guy’s 4th and 5th questions and Seth’s responses are particularly enlightening as they have to do with how different companies handle criticism. Here’s a small quote that reveals just how much a story can do for you:

“Apple is pretty closed to criticism, but the story they tell is so compelling they get away with it.”

I believe that there are three great secrets to marketing and I would like to highlight 37Signals, one of my favorite web companies, and show how they use these “secrets”. The first secret is to create something compelling, something that you can tell a great story about. Basecamp, their project management tool, fits this bill and is unique because, among overwrought and overpriced competitors, it is cheap, easy to use, and yet flexible enough to work for almost any type of project.

Visit basecamphq.com for a masterclass in how to sell a product by telling a story. From the screenshots and glowing user testimonials, to the confident statements about less being more and the free sign-up, you are always given a reason to believe, to drink the kool-aid as it were, and to get in there and try the product. Even on their sign-up page, they show you the pricing structure, but in big type above it all they tell you: “A variety of plans to fit everyone’s needs. You can change plans at any time, so there’s no wrong answer.” This is the reassuring icing on the cake.

The second marketing secret is to listen to, be a part of, and contribute to your community. The Signals do a great job of listening to their community. This is showcased first of all in their product support. I’ve always gotten a timely response to my support emails, usually from the founder himself, Jason Fried. A minor complaint is that the replies are sometimes a bit robotic. I’ve emailed a couple times over the last year about particular features, and instead of their thoughts on my suggestion, I always get the same cut-and-paste “we’ll consider it” response. The important thing though is that they do respond personally if you have a problem, and since they are a small company and are building and supporting their own product, I can’t really complain that they don’t personalize every response to feature requests.

What they do get HUGE points for is their opensource Ruby on Rails product. Rails is a super useful web development platform that fully embraces community involvment and participation. And it is a constant reminder that 37Signals creates awesome products. It is a global and tireless indirect marketing platform for their suite of useful tools. This is probably one of the best examples of how serving your community for altruistic purposes can reap huge rewards for your company as a side benefit.

The third secret of marketing fits in almost as a sub section of the first two. It is your tone. Your tone in marketing and in responding to criticism. 37Signals has the marketing tone down pat; you won’t catch them spouting off with nearly unintelligble business speak. They don’t sound like a large corporation. They preach a simple message that just seems to resonate and make sense.

Their tone in response to criticism isn’t always as effortless, but it’s almost always spot on. Take their recent blog post about BusinessWeek’s cover story on Kevin Rose of Digg.com for example.

This post got a huge response from readers and I was surprised to see how scathing some of the comments were. Attacks were made on 37Signals in response to things Jason didn’t actually say. Jason and David replied back and I couldn’t help but feel that they were being drawn into a fight they’d already won. They said what they had to say in rebuttal, and did it succinctly and in good taste, avoiding the urge I’m sure they felt to retaliate.

Opening your blog up to attack means you have to sometimes defend yourself too. It’s a tough job and I think it can become difficult to maintain persepective and great tone. It’s hard to convey humour and openess to others via text, but it can be done, and I think the Signals are trying to do it.

It’s important to remember that every word you utter on your blog and product sites is being read by a human, not by a machine. The human who’s reading what you write admires simplicity, openess, honesty, loyalty, and a sense of humour, just like everybody else. Your tone should reflect this understanding.

So those are the three “secrets” of marketing and I’m sure you’ve realized by now that they aren’t secrets at all, just common sense. They bear repeating though because while they may be easy to say, they are often very difficult to execute on. Minutes to learn, perhaps a lifetime to master.