August 2, 2024
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This Week's Top Marketing News

What Are Productized Services?

Businesses that sell products have something physical the customer can touch, feel, test drive, try on, or sample before they buy it. These tangibles help the consumer mind quickly equate what they are getting for their money.

Service businesses are different. It is harder to see the service since it lacks the physical state. Consumers are forced to estimate the time it will take to complete the job. This is usually done with a simple equation of an hourly rate time the projected time to complete the project plus/minus additional expenditures and time not originally accounted for.

Wait… what? Yeah, pricing services can be difficult to get right and even more challenging to do in a way the customer is going to fully understand.

This is where productized services come in to save the day.

Productized services are services packaged into an easy-to-digest result that gives customers a clear picture of what they will receive for their money. Seems pretty simple but too many service-based businesses are not taking advantage of this strategy because this is not the way they’ve always done business. That is a bad excuse.

Here are some advantages to productizing your services:

1. Close Clients Faster - How many customers are you losing because of your bloated process? They fill out a form to wait for your call to set up a meeting to discuss their custom solution. Give customers the option to buy directly from your website.
2. Avoid Project Scope Creep - Pre-defined packages clearly outline exactly what the customer will receive. This makes it easier to keep the work within the confines of the agreement and the ability to upsell for additional services.
3. Scalability - Every custom project requires a unique workflow that requires more time which you could devote towards customer happiness.
4. Increase Profitability - All 3 of the above advantages should equate to more profitability for your business. If not, you’re doing it wrong.

Fish Food:

The professional services world loves to offer customized everything, especially custom quotes that fit the exact needs of your unique business… I’m pretty sure we’ve plugged that line into at least 100 websites in the past 15 years. Yes, offer custom solutions to those who need them, but most service businesses sell the same handful of packages to nearly every customer they create a “custom” quote for. Do yourself a favor and explore how you can productize your services and reduce all the current barriers costing you time and money.

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​What Happens When AI is Learning From AI?

For AI models to continue to grow, they need access to more data… a lot of additional data. Human data is expensive and the growing concerns about AI "borrowing" copyrighted information are limiting available resources. This is forcing AI developers to use machine-produced alternatives or AI-generated data. As you might imagine, this could create a problem. Some analysts believe this learning style will damage its effectiveness leading to its demise. I'm more worried it will generate a black hole and begin sucking planet Earth into another universe. Let's hope I'm wrong.

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Chipotle Launches Its First-Ever Beauty Product

What’s your marketing move when all other fast food chains are missing their earnings reports and you are still crushing it? You partner with a beauty brand to create a beauty product. With the help of Wonderskin, Chipotle has created a guacamole-inspired green, foil-colored lip gloss called Lipotle that can last up to 10 hours. They explain that “Lipotle is a sensory journey, like walking down the front line at Chipotle”. Yes, this all totally makes sense. 😕
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How Video Consumption Is Changing in 2024 [New Research]

Are you still waiting for this video fad to go away? You might be right there with that lonely Yellow Pages salesperson still waiting for the internet to run its course.

Video is only growing in popularity. There are 3.3 billion people worldwide consuming video and 89% of them want to see more videos from brands. More than half of them share video content and the majority feel videos should be shorter than 60 seconds.

HubSpot created another one of their crazy-long studies by surveying everyone with a pulse and compiling all that information into a blog post with a downloadable report. Here are some of the video trends they found.

1. Consumers prefer to explore brands via video - Consumers want to see your product or service in action. The best way to see this is video.
2. Conversions are made directly in the video - Place a buy now or book a demo/call button in your videos.
3. Brands must create relatable and authentic content - You can’t skip this step and don’t even think about leaning 100% on AI.
4. Consumers prefer shorter videos - Unless you have 10 minutes of valuable content to share, keep it short and simple.

The article also has statistics about which social media platforms get used to sharing video the most and details about how Gen Z uses video vs. your Aunt Edna.

Fish Food:

Video marketing can be intimidating to those not actively doing it. All things new are intimidating until you understand how they work. The best thing to do is start with a single video that answers the most common question you receive every single day. Limit your answer to 60 seconds. Have your 12-year-old niece edit and publish the thing for you. It’s so easy you might do another one.

Microsoft's LinkedIn Settles Advertisers' Lawsuit Over Alleged Overcharges

LinkedIn has agreed to pay $6.625 million to settle a class action lawsuit where they were accused of overcharging advertisers by stating more people watched the video ads than happened. The settlement awarded LinkedIn advertisers in the US who purchased ads between January 2015 and May 2023.
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​UGC Strategy: Boosting Visibility and Sales With Customer Content

User-generated content (UGC) is “content created and published by users of a platform or brand, typically on social channels”. It is the truest form of customer testimonials and a powerful tool for promoting your brand in an authentic way from genuine users of your product or service. This strategy feels like it aligns with B2C better than B2B but some creativity could easily bridge that gap and make you a unicorn in that space.
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​Why YouTube and TikTok creators aren’t going all-in on AI-generated videos

AI has made everyone’s life easier in the past 18 months. While some have embraced the true use of AI being a tool to help expedite the content creation process, others have decided to use AI to completely replace their content marketing efforts. Those making a living from content creation weigh in on how they are using AI in their content creation process and why they are still keeping a lot of the human element in their workflow. The beginning of this video shares a comical AI-generated piece of content that shows exactly why you cannot rely 100% on robots just yet.
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Expert’s Guide to a Social Media Competitor Analysis

Sometimes your social media strategy gets stuck in a rut. Your audience is not quite loving your content like they used to and you have no idea why. This can be frustrating because what was once working is no longer as effective while you see others posting content and getting lots of engagement.

Before throwing in the towel on social media and hiring sign spinners to annoy drivers passing by your location, consider conducting a social media competitor analysis. Sometimes the clues are right in front of you… you need to know where to look.

Neil Patel created a detailed guide covering the steps to analyze your competition and get your social media strategy back on track.

Here are some key reasons to conduct a social media competitor analysis:

1. Understand Industry Trends - Learn about emerging patterns and topics resonating with audiences.
2. Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses - See where you are winning and where you need to improve.
3. Enhance Your Content Strategy - Understand the types of content that audiences find attractive and engaging.
4. Establish Performance Benchmarks - Identify metrics you can use to measure your progress.
5. Uncover New Opportunities - Find gaps in your strategy to fill in or gaps in your competitors’ strategy you can exploit.
6. Increase Your Audience Engagement - See what works best to increase engagement.

The steps to complete a social media competitor analysis outlined in this extensive article include:

1. Identify Your Competitors - Figure out who your top 4-6 competitors are and which platforms they use.
2. Analyze Competitors’ Social Media - Do a deep dive into their follower metrics, engagement rate, posting frequency, and use of hashtags.
3. Perform a SWOT Analysis - See how you measure in strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats against your competitors.
4. Compare Strategies and Develop Actionable Insights - See where your strategy differs from competitors to determine how you can refine the tactics in your strategy.

Neil also includes a list of social media tools you can use to help complete your competitor analysis.

Fish Food:

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. The formula for making it all work is available with a little bit of research. Pay special attention to the content topic ideas you can generate from this process. Understanding the content your audience is interested in learning about is oftentimes the biggest challenge. Like Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Just make sure you don’t literally steal their content… be a smart and ethical marketer by creating your own content.

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