Using "First Principles" to Create Buzz With Your Marketing
The building blocks of true knowledge are always about thinking first principles rather than taking what already exists as the basis of our thinking.
Great marketers like David Ogilvy had always thought that way — to keep the first principles top of mind. That's why he's able to create information-rich content, with a 'soft-sell' element in his copies that didn't insult the intelligence of the prospects, but rather tapped into the human psychology and understanding from the prospects' point of view.
"I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy," Elon Musk said, adding, "We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. Slight iterations on a theme."
Say in design. Gmail was created to solve the problems that existing email services had at that time — such as the limitations of usability and searchability. Hence Gmail tackles these by adding features and beautiful designs to tackle them. If we were to reason by analogy, we might think that Gmail is not very simplistic and minimalistic (it is, at least for me) — so you thought of an idea to create something very similar to Gmail, but much more minimalistic by dropping some features and maybe adding different shades of color to simplify things.
If we reason by first principles, we go deep into human psychology and think first principles. Is this relevant to my users? Are these design techniques useful in that they enable my users to send emails easily and not have the struggles to do so?
Whether you use a community-led growth strategy or product-led growth strategy for your company, reasoning by first principles always allows you to learn the fundamental issues that people face so that you can create solutions around them — not just adding on or subtracting features from existing solutions and call it your very own.
Today, we'll discuss some first principles that will help you create buzz and disruption with your marketing strategy. Let's see what they are:
1. Don't make something unless you know how to distribute
Making something without knowing how to market it is a recipe for disaster — and it doesn't matter how great your product is. If you don't know how to market it, you won't be able to reach your target audience, let alone make sales.
You need to have a plan. You need to know who your target audience is, what channels you'll use to reach them, and how you'll convince them to buy your product. You also need to know how you'll measure the success of your marketing efforts — and be clear about what metrics you're analyzing.
So take the time to develop a marketing plan and make sure you have the necessary resources to execute it.
2. Be 10x more valuable than your competitors
As Alex Hormozi clearly mentioned — to be able to get a piece of a market you have to be 10x better at marketing or 10x better at delivering the product to your customers. If you don't know how to — you're going to have a hard time competing in your industry.
For both marketing and delivering, their successes largely come down to the offer you have. To create a great offer, you can check out $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex himself.
Why having an offer is so important?
No offer? No business. No life.
Bad offer? Negative profit. No business. Miserable life.
Decent offer? No profit. Stagnating business. Stagnating life.
Good offer? Some profit. Okay business. Okay life.
Grand Slam Offer? Fantastic profit. Insane business. Freedom.
– Alex Hormozi
3. Relevance is better than perfection
Be timely and relevant, not be a perfectionist or try to be smart.
As a marketer, it's absolutely important to be on trend and provide a unique offer. Be agile and don't wait for the perfect timing, because the truth is, there will never be a perfect time.
What customers look for is whether the message was correctly and succinctly brought across. Ultimately, it's about how many people convert and not who has the prettiest design or error-free email.
4. Simplify, repeat, simplify, repeat
The best and most useful marketing campaigns come down to how simple your message is. It's about the simple distillation of your message. Like Einstein said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
A simple message is easily remembered and when it is constantly and continuously repeated to your customers, it gets stuck in their minds.
As I’ve mentioned on my About page, there are generally two types of marketers:
A Simplifier, who explains their product and brand messaging in the most succinct and digestible way
A Complexifier, who explains their product and brand messaging with jargon and technical terms that nobody would understand
Marketers who use complex terms think that they sound smart. But in actuality, the smart ones are the marketers who are able to simplify concepts. It just goes to show that the 'complexifier' are either insecure or they don't really know their product well.
5. Don't be average, win the internet
Think bigger and don't do what others are doing. Differentiate your product.
You can focus on a niche market and offer something that no one else does — a unique product that is tailored to a specific customer base or a unique customer experience. For example, you can offer a personalized customer service experience that is tailored to the needs of your customers.
Also, offering a higher quality product can make you stand out. Quality can be achieved through better materials, better processes, better customer service, or innovation.
Know your goals, what story you want to tell, understand how to distribute your story, and who you should partner with.
The point is that if you're not special or unique in providing something, the chances of winning the internet are very slim. So never be average, be unique and helpful.
6. Apathy is the worst marketing strategy
Always be empathic to your customers and provide the best solutions to them. Notice I said your customers? You have to know your customers well enough so that you understand their pain points. However, you cannot be a jack of all trades and a master of none. Marketing requires you to be specific and targeted.
Also, by providing almost everything without a specialized area, your customers can sense the absence of care. If there's not much caring involved for your customers, they can't relate to your product and offer and therefore, they'll reject yours for others.
7. Give customers what they want and give them what they yet know they want
It's a little complicated here but let me distill it for you.
When you're looking to buy things online, do you search for things that are totally new to you or something that is familiar to you? Most of the time, it's the latter. We are more comfortable and have some sort of familiarity and resonance with the things we know.
A classic example is the iPod — "1,000 Songs in your pocket".
We used to listen to music using MP3 players. They were very difficult to operate and had little storage space. And without a question, the iPod was a fantastic innovation.
iPod was created using a concept called MAYA, or Most Advanced Yet Acceptable which theorizes this principle. Essentially, the principle suggests that people are more likely to pay attention to things that are new and novel, but not so new that they are seen as completely unfamiliar or unacceptable. And that is what the iPod did exactly.
If you're giving customers what they want only without an added unique feature, it will be similar to your competitors' offers and you wouldn't even stand a chance competing with them.
That’s the 7 first principles of marketing that marketers should keep top of mind whenever they come up with a new marketing campaign. While you can call these “conventional wisdom”, it’s always good to question before applying them to your publicity strategies.
Till next time,
Alvis