Customers Do Not Care About Your Features 🤷‍♂️


April 5, 2024
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This Week's Top Marketing News

How to Use Benefits as a Competitive Advantage

In 1960, Theodore Levitt unveiled a pivotal concept: customers don't buy products for the features but rather for the benefits they bring. This notion, termed "marketing myopia," emphasizes the importance of focusing on customer needs rather than product features.

By focusing on the benefits you provide, you accomplish several important things:

  • You show customers you understand their needs and how your product or service helps them, building connections and trust.
  • You differentiate yourself from competitors who only talk about themselves.
  • You can discover opportunities for improvement and new offerings by deeply understanding the customer's perspective.
  • You speak the customer's language rather than just internal jargon about features.

There are three primary benefit types:

  1. Functional benefits: Ways to save time or money.
  2. Symbolic benefits Appeal to a customer's identity and feelings of success or belonging.
  3. Experiential benefits Targeting the emotional or sensory gratification during product use.

One technique, "laddering," facilitates understanding customers' underlying motivations by repeatedly asking "why." This method helps uncover deep-seated emotional or symbolic benefits that inform effective marketing strategies.

Segmenting markets based on benefit preferences enables you to tailor your messaging within your customer base. Prioritizing segments based on size, growth potential, competitive landscape, and brand alignment streamlines marketing efforts.

Understanding your benefits strengthens its identity and can drive business growth. Identify your core benefits and explore avenues to deliver them to more customers through product expansion or strategic partnerships.

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​Fish Food: Remember, it's not about you; it's about your customers. Highlighting your benefits in your messaging can be the "aha" moment for potential customers seeking solutions.

Understanding and leveraging these benefits distinguishes your business and resonates deeply with your target audience. Focusing on what truly matters to your customers establishes trust and will drive business growth.


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VIDEO: YouTube Thumbnail Design—50% More Views With This Strategy!

Do you think simply using bright colors will make your video thumbnail stand out? Think again. This video reviews some A/B testing using the TubeBuddy app and why it’s important to A/B test your YouTube Thumbnails. Tips include clear titles, highlighting the most important words or phrases, and engaging images with clear-to-understand text.
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How To Get More Email Subscribers (Fast and Easy)

Chances are, you already have a lead magnet. However, what truly sets you apart in garnering 100 or 100,000 email subscribers lies in the relevance and value of that lead magnet. So, the issue isn’t necessarily whether you have one but rather how impactful your lead magnet is on your audience. This strategy, in combination with a few more listed, is one way to boost your email list with content you already have with a few tweaks.

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The Marketer’s Guide to Reddit

Whether paid or organic, check out this great overview if you have ever wondered about using Reddit as a marketing channel for your business. It covers what brands are using Reddit for, what marketing on Reddit looks like, and whether you should consider getting started with Reddit marketing. It also covers ideal organic and paid marketing opportunities, how the voting system works, Reddit SEO, and some great ad examples to learn from.


The YouTube Growth Strategy Mr. Beast, Cocomelon, & Like Nastya Use to Dominate the Internet

Ready to be the next Global superpower on YouTube? If you are a global brand, you need to think global audience for your videos.

Inclusion marketing could help you punch your ticket to greatness.

Mr. Beast, Cocomelon, and Like Nastya are powerhouses leveraging inclusion marketing to scale on YouTube and other video platforms. For instance, Mr. Beast's multi-language content approach has been pivotal in his rapid ascent.

Global Audience Reach: How-To Guide

  • Language-Specific Channels: Establish dedicated channels tailored to different languages, ensuring engagement with diverse audiences.
  • One Channel, Multiple Languages: Opt for a unified channel strategy, delivering content in various languages to broaden reach without fragmenting your audience.

Localization Strategies

  • Human-Dubbed Content: Invest in professional dubbing services for seamless translations and enhanced viewer experiences.
  • AI-Dubbed Content: Utilize AI technology for efficient content dubbing, offering cost-effective solutions for international outreach.
  • Multi-Language Subtitles: Enhance accessibility with subtitles, facilitating effortless engagement across global viewership.

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​Fish Food: Embrace inclusivity in your content strategy to unlock new avenues of growth and forge impactful relationships in the ever-expanding YouTube landscape. If you are ready to go global with your marketing, don’t forget to include your worldwide audience and how they prefer to watch and view your content - probably in their language - when you post your videos.


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35 Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know

Do you love stats? Search Engine Journal has 35 content marketing stats on Usage, strategy, types of content, creation, distribution, consumption, performance, and challenges. Here are a few to whet your appetite. 97% of marketers succeeded with their content marketing efforts, and 83% of marketers emphasize the importance of quality over quantity when creating content. According to B2B marketers surveyed by CMI, LinkedIn emerged as the most prevalent and effective organic social media distribution channel, with 84% of respondents reporting its success, surpassing other platforms by a significant margin.

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8 Tips To Boost Your Facebook Page Engagement [Infographic]

Social media is a goldmine for connecting with your target audience on an authentic level, but even with consistent posting and replying, you may not be seeing the social media growth you’d like to see. Here are some great tips you can implement to extend your reach and boost engagement on Facebook. Here are some highlights: post native videos directly to Facebook, optimize your videos & create video playlists, go live, post exclusive content, and interact & engage meaningfully.
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16 Reasons Why Your Page Isn’t Ranking On Google

Trying to figure out why your website pages are not ranking on Google can be frustrating. Especially when you see the pages Google is ranking at the top sub-par to the content you have.

Google's product is to deliver the best information it has read (indexed) on the internet to satisfy the search query users key into the search bar. There are a lot of factors that go into the split-second decision-making of its algorithm to generate a search engine results page.

First things first, you need to figure out if the page is not ranking at all (Google doesn't know it exists) versus not ranking well (Google simply does not think it's important).

This is key.

If a page isn’t ranking well, then it speaks to a problem with how Google perceives the content. This means you’ll likely need to optimize it further.

If the page isn’t ranking at all, this could mean that it’s not been seen by Google or Google cannot index it.

This Search Engine Journal article maps out 16 reasons why your web page is not ranking on Google and things you should address.

The reasons are broken down into 3 key areas:

Technical Issues

  • Crawling Blocks: Sometimes Google has problems accessing your page. Google might be unable to read your page because it's mistakenly blocked by your robots.txt file.
  • Indexing Issues: Sometimes Google cannot find your page. Use Google Search Console to make sure it knows your page exists.
  • Internal Links: A web page with no internal links is like a room with no doors. No one is getting in. Be sure your web page has links coming from other pages on your website.
  • Speed: Google does consider the load time of a page. Large images, poorly structured code, or improper use of Javascript can slow page speed to a painful halt.
  • Rendering: Google needs to be able to produce or render your page. If your code stops it from doing so, it cannot read it.

Content Reasons

  • Cannibalization: Some of your very similar web pages could be competing against each other causing Google to devalue their importance.
  • Content Format: Sometimes text content is not enough. If Google ranks video content above your text content, consider including a video with your text.
  • Search Intent/Relevance: Your content must align with the expected results of the searcher.
  • Competitor Content is Better: Google is going to rank the best content it has available. If your competitor's content is more helpful, it will outrank yours.
  • Poor Optimization: The content of your page could be missing key elements like proper use of H tags, ALT tags, and keyword density.
  • Uniqueness: Avoid content that has already been written hundreds of times by others.
  • Language: Be sure your content is written in/for the language where you wish to rank.
  • Manual Actions: Violating Google's policies with spammy content or deceptive measures will hurt you more than you know.

Credibility Reasons

  • Links: External links from third-party sites that rank well give your web page extra popularity points in Google's eyes.
  • E-E-A-T Signals: Google does calculate the experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of your content.
  • Algorithm Reasons: Yes, sometimes Google makes drastic updates to their algorithm that have dramatic initial impacts that can cause a puzzling drop in rankings. Weather the storm. If you're solid on all the items above, you'll come out okay.

Fish Food: Ultimately, the article advises against hastily attributing ranking issues to algorithm updates and emphasizes the importance of methodical troubleshooting and testing to avoid further drops in rankings. Start with great content your site visitors will find valuable and meticulously monitor the performance of your website pages by following these guidelines. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

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Fishbowl Friday

Our team spends the week reading everything on the internet related to marketing and highlights the best news you need to know about in our weekly email called Fishbowl Friday. Subscribe today and get all the best marketing news sent straight to your inbox in a fun, 5-minute read.

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