⚡️ What makes a top 0.1% marketer

Hey 👋

What we are about to talk about is one of the most powerful chapters in the book Breakthrough Advertising. It's from chapter 6, "Inside your prospects mind — What makes people read, want, believe."

Any quotes used in this section are from that book.

And while this book was written in the 1960s, and geared towards advertisements, its frameworks are evergreen and can be applied to almost any piece of content or page — be it a homepage, landing page, blog post, or ad.

Essentially, when someone lands on your website, they will either consciously or subconsciously ask themselves 3 questions:

1. Does this product satisfy my desires?

2. Does this product work? Does it fulfill my role?

3. Is anyone actually using this product? Do I believe this is best product I can use to satisfy my desire(s)?

For this section, we'll talk about your website's homepage.

Your homepage is where you can "alter your prospect's vision of reality." The copy and design on your homepage must "create a new world for your prospect — a world in which your product emerges as the fulfillment of the dominant desire that caused" someone to land on your website in the first place.

Let's dive deeper with real world examples.

Desire (1/3)

In the book, desire is defined as "the wants, needs, cravings, thirsts, hungers, lusts, etc. that drive your prospect through life."

It's very hard to create desire. But you can "expand them, sharpen them, channel them, and give them a goal."

In the case of a homepage, this is your "hero" section (the first part someone sees).

Instead of using marketing jargon in your headline, tap into a desire people have. Webflow does a great job of this by using words like "you" and "your" and tapping into a frustrating problem for the prospect:

Webflow's target audience has a desire to build custom websites without relying on heavy engineering resources.

It taps into a desire individuals who can't code have and marketing teams who hate submitting engineering tickets to get changes made on their site.

Now go and look at your headline. Is it feeding into a true desire your ideal customer has? Does it make your prospect immediately go, "woah, wait, wtf!? Is this really what I've been looking for??"

How to win: Lean into the true desire your prospect has for even wanting to use a product like yours.

Identification/Roles (2/3)

This is where your prospect starts to think about the legitimacy of your product and how it will act as a tool to accomplish their desire.

This is going to be the middle part of your homepage and probably the most copy-intensive part.

In the book, this section is defined as the personality traits someone wants your product to help them build or project. "Call them what you will — goals, hopes, dreams, ambitions, envies, admirations phantasies, objectives — these subtle, symbolic, never-openly-spoken projections of our own self-images are immensely powerful sales forces. Your task is to put them directly behind your product."

So in this part, show how your product fits into your prospect's role. Ahrefs' homepage (after you scroll past the hero section) does a great job of this:

And they continue to do a good job as you scroll down, with a demo video to show how the product works and a section that shows who it's for:

Ahh, this role part is done so well. Ahrefs' headline is also another great example of desire (1/3).

How to win: Prove your product works. Prove that it fulfills your prospects role(s).

Beliefs

This is the world of emotionalized reason.

It's very hard to change someone's beliefs. It's not a game you want to play. Instead, give direction to your prospects beliefs. Use their own logic, not your own, to prove that your product satisfies their desires.

This includes showing your prospect that other people just like them already use your product (social proof) and proving that your product is the best fit for their role.

Notion's homepage does a great job with the social proof part:

But you want to take this one step further. You want to show your prospect that no other product satisfies their desire as well as yours.

Ghost's homepage (towards the bottom) does a great job of this:

How to win: Prove people rely on your product. Prove that no other product satisfies their needs as well as yours does. Show your product's greatest strength.

And that's it! Now you know the psychological framework for getting people to listen to what you have to say. Of course, it's not always clear-cut. You can actually weave the elements of desire, roles, and beliefs into each other to create a more fluid story.

But now you know the 3 elements that you can work with that exist in your prospect's mind.

If there's one takeaway, it's that people always have a desire for something. And sometimes that desire is a bit vague in their mind. Your job as a marketer is to turn that vague desire into concrete images that your prospect can understand and believe in.

Just knowing this will put you in the top 0.1% of marketers. This is marketing from first principles.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• Real examples of how messaging affects positioning

• How to use product-led content

• Bing's new ChatGPT integration

• How to think about brand when you have no product

• Ad from the past

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Google announces Bard, its AI

• Meta embraces AI as Facebook, Instagram help drive a rebound

• Snapchat adds 12M users in Q4, posts lower than expected revenue result

• Marketers seek agency-of-record relationships with influencer agencies

🚀 All things product & growth

Real examples of messaging for brand positioning, a customer storytelling worksheet resource, 7 skills growth marketers should have, and how to nail growth levers using the ICE (impact, confidence, ease) framework.

✍️ Content, copy, & emails

How to use product-led content, how to choose content marketing topics, 7 practical ways to write copy that converts, and how to avoid the email spam inbox.

⚙️ SEO

Does changing H1 and your intro text improve CTR and conversions, the future of B2B SEO, and Bing's new ChatGPT integration.

🎨 Branding, sales, & operations

How to think about brand with no product, building a winning sales enablement strategy, and how to get your marketing team to drive more impact.

🧠 Extra stuff

Thinking from first principles before asking Google, making your next career move, how to become unforgettable, and a market expansion strategy for SaaS companies.

📣 Ad from the past

(New Balance ad from 1988)

Huh?! New features but weighs less? This is unheard of!

(Remember what we talked about last week about giving people something they've never seen before? 😏)

💻 Website Product of the week

🏝 Cool remote marketing jobs

• Head of Growth Marketing at Patreon

• Social Media and Community Manager at Supabase

• Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Trusted Health

• Senior Product Marketing Manager at Ramp

• Content Marketing Associate at Fundraise Up

Okay, that's it for now 💜. See you next Tuesday!

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." — Agnes de Mille

Riddle answer: TikTok 💀