99.9% of markets these days are highly saturated.
Chances are you’re not selling groundbreaking stuff — you’re selling the same product with slightly different packaging.
Which means your success largely falls on the shoulders of your marketing messages.
In one of my favorite marketing books, called Great Leads, there’s a question that challenges you to write better marketing copy almost immediately.
The question is…
“What does your customer already know?”
In other words, what are the claims and promises your customer hears on a daily basis, which they’ve become numb to?
The answers are all around you.
Open your inbox, and you’ll see campaigns that all look and sound the same.
Supplement brands promising the same transformations.
Luggage brands selling bags that “take you further.”
Fashion brands selling shirts that “move with you.”
(On a separate note, if you happen to know anyone who goes “I really want to buy a t-shirt that moves with me”, please introduce me to them because I’d love to know what that even means)
All these are marketing messages that your customer sees and hears every day.
They don’t care.
They’re sick and tired of hearing them.
In Eugene Schwartz’s terms, you’re dealing with Level 4 and 5 audiences.
All these people are yearning for some entertainment.
The moment you break the pattern and deliver something different, or in a unique way, you’ve done your job as a marketer.
Use competitor research to inform your strategy, but don’t do it for the purpose of copying others.
Use it to ask yourself: “How can we do the exact opposite?”
The only way to stand out is by creating contrast.
Best practices don’t exist
Another question I always get from clients is “What are the best practices of doing XYZ?”
And sure… there are best practices for the “what.”
e.g. if you run an online store and you want to dial in your email strategy, it probably makes sense to “send 3-4 email campaigns a week”, and “have the basic automations covered.”
I’m not denying that…
But there are no best practices for the “how.”
If you sell makeup products, and I start telling you “yeah, the other day I set this cart abandonment flow up for this site selling cow meat, it printed cash…”
I’m not showing my knowledge or experience, I’m just demonstrating my ignorance. 😂
That’s because every brand is different.
Every market is different.
And your marketing needs to be different.
I’ve had tons of cases where I thought “this will crush” only to find out the complete opposite after doing a split test.
Which brings me to my final point…
An opinion without data is just an assumption
In my 8 years of marketing experience, I’ve learned to never assume anything.
Data is the only source of truth.
In the beginning, when you don’t have any data to work with, you have no choice but to make assumptions, but you should always validate them.
If you don’t know what your pop-up offer should be, just test it.
If you don’t know whether you should give discounts in your cart abandonment flow, just test it.
If you don’t know whether to send plain text vs designed emails, just test it.
Make sure you follow some sort of testing roadmap.
You want to prioritize tests with the biggest audiences, and variables that can realistically drive an incremental lift (subject lines and button colors don’t fall under this bucket).
Otherwise, as Seth Godin puts it, if you just mindlessly test everything, you’ll end up with a porn site.
