Date Your Customers
Nice guys may finish last, but bad boys don’t get introduced to the family or friends
We’ve all seen (or been) that guy in a bar that gives the same cheesy line to ten girls and goes home with one of them. Whether we revile or parody him, he gets what he wants because he knows it’s all a numbers game. Talk to enough girls, hone your image and pick-up lines, remember what works and you’ll soon be able to confidently and repeatedly find that attention you’re seeking. He may even read books like ‘The Game’ to learn psychological tricks he can employ to increase his chances of success. The cost of failure is often just the price of a drink, and there are plenty more fish in the sea.
Oddly enough, many marketers approach their jobs in precisely the same way. We find ways to expand our reach, we hone our image and messaging, and we track what works — all with the aim of being able to confidently and repeatedly hit our user acquisition goals. We may even read books like ‘Predictably Irrational’ to learn psychological tricks we can employ to increase our conversion rate. The cost of failure is often just a small percentage of our budget and there are plenty more users on the internet.
These sorts of tactics work just as well for marketers as they do in the world of dating… for a while. Eventually this behaviour catches up with you — living fast usually precipitates dying young. The thousands of users you brought in via a social media competition left as soon as you announced the winner of the iPad. The people you coerced into signing up to your email list by promising the World… disappeared shortly after you failed to deliver the World. “Nice guys finish last” you chortled as you spammed your users with yet another email demanding that they download your app…
A few years on and your priorities have changed. Instant gratification has become less gratifying and the game is getting harder to play. Your well-crafted lines now seem stale and scripted. Nobody is sticking around for long, you’re getting a bad reputation and people are warning their friends to avoid you. You realise that while you wasted your time playing games, your competitors were out there building real relationships. Those who thought you might be something special got tired of you repeatedly taking advantage of their good will. The ones that still talk to you treat you as their guilty pleasure — never a serious prospect to tell the friends or family about.
How did it all go so wrong?
Most of the marketers I know have managed to avoid this trap in dating, but this is something I am seeing more frequently in the world of marketing. These short-term, metrics-based tactics are used with reckless abandon by ambitious marketers or growth hackers looking to make their charts move up and to the right. They are revered and rightly so — such intense focus on improving the core metrics of the business is honourable. However sometimes this can lead to all sorts of bizarre and inauspicious behaviour — harming the user’s experience and ultimately killing your brand by a thousand cuts.
For some it starts as a minor indiscretion that spirals into an addiction — run that spammy social media competition just once to ‘hit your numbers’, but next quarter you get given a higher target to hit, necessitating that you run another and another. Before long you might find yourself spending all your time desperately brainstorming new ways to spam your users. All the good will they once had for your brand is eroded — making each new tactic perform worse than the last, leaving you no time to do any real, value-added marketing.
So how do you avoid this trap? Repeat after me:
The key to long-term success in marketing (and love) is to make sure both sides are getting value from the relationship
Always be thinking about what you can do for the other side to add value to the relationship, particularly if there’s something you are in a position to offer that is easy for you, but solves a big headache on their behalf. Know that asking for a desired behaviour always has a cost, even if it’s hard to measure or won’t be billed for a while. The best marketers (and partners) give with one hand if they’re taking with the other. For example Dropbox gives you extra storage space for inviting your friends, and the friends that join get more space via your invitation than they could get just by signing up normally.
Don’t take advantage for too long — sure you’ll still employ dirty tactics every now and again to get what you want, but always remember that too much of this will atrophy your relationship. You can still run a competition but don’t give away an iPad — make the competition based on a shared interest, like a travel company giving away an amazing holiday or a photographer giving away signed prints. Just remember that no matter how much you feel you’ve given, often both sides will feel hard done by.
Don’t pressure your users into committing before they’re ready — it may be that moving to the next level before they really ‘get’ what you’re about will end in disaster. Maybe they need to see what they’re signing up for, take a test drive and learn to trust you before they’re ready to take things up a notch. Above all, don’t keep begging them to ‘share’ your product — work at improving what you have to offer, so that you’re the type of brand they’d feel proud to show off to their friends and family.
It’s not going to be easy, but nothing worth having ever is.
Contact me on Twitter with any questions / feedback @2michaeltaylor
