REVENUE GENERATION PROCESS FOR GLOBAL SCALING SERIES
The Most Important Rule In Marketing: 222
Learn how to convert visitors to leads and viewers to users better than you do today
That was the first thing I learned from Ratmir Timashev, founder of Veeam Software that grew from 0 to over 1 billion USD in sales in under 10 years. He liked to spend a lot of time simplifying complex concepts into catchy and easy-to-grasp one-liners — and this habit made every team member’s life easier and helped us grow faster than most.
The rule reads as “Two-Twenty-Two”
and expands into the following narrative:
you have two seconds to buy twenty seconds to buy two minutes [of my attention]
What can a person do in two seconds?
Take a glance at your google ad. Scan a title of an article in your blog or a “hero block” on your website. The point is: your one-sentence statement that I can process in two seconds has to be relevant to some problem that troubles me, consciously or not, right now. But it’s not only that — I have probably seen different proposed solutions to my problem already and in all likelihood even tried some. Hence, yours has to be different, catchy, original to warrant giving you my precious next twenty seconds of attention.
Some research shows that the average attention span has actually decreased from 20 seconds to 8 seconds over the last 5 years, but “two-eight-two” doesn’t sound as catchy.
That’s why specific titles work better than generic ones — my brain needs some concrete information to decide whether to dig further, but not too much so that ADD kicks in. That’s why people like clicking on “list-based” articles — all these clickbaity “Top-5 reasons why..” and the like. That’s why numbers and facts work better in the title than emotions — unlike in the story itself.
It pays to design the titles for articles, web pages, google ads very carefully. They serve as the start of your funnel — the higher conversion here, the better overall performance.
You managed to buy my 20 seconds with your title; what next?
A typical person can read and somewhat process a couple of paragraphs of text or a paragraph and a picture in 20 seconds. The goal of these 20 seconds is for you to show how you can help me. Not brag about the features of your product (soooo many startups and even bigger companies still do that it breaks my heart). Not talk about your company history, achievements, contributions to charity, or revenue growth. How can you help me?
Talk about my problem. Relate to it. Empathize with my struggles. Show me that you understand what I’m going through, and then show me the way out.
VMware’s product was virtualization. What we sold was “get the same server performance and never seen before flexibility at 10% of the cost” and “peace of mind for your system administrators.” Of course, I want my infrastructure to cost me less and run with fewer issues!
SAP’s most famous ad campaign was “best-run companies run SAP.” Of course, I want to be among the best-run companies, and who cares about the whole correlation vs. causation debacle?
So, in the 20 seconds I just granted you — focus on value, on emotion, on making me want to understand how you will achieve what you promise. Don’t try to explain the how at this stage — rather make me want to learn the how! Twenty seconds is not nearly enough, and I am not hooked yet to dig through the details of technology or feature comparison tables.
Show me a bright future that I would want, that I would fall in love with — and only then will I be ready to give you my two minutes to learn the details.
The two minutes of “how.”
You caught my attention. You managed to convince me that the future you are offering me is the one I want — or at least would like to explore further. Only now is the time to explain to me the finer details of the future you are offering and how you are going to build it. It is easy to say, “would you like to have a computer that stores 100x information and is 100x faster than the one you use today?” Everyone would like to have it. The question is — are you able to deliver?
These two minutes is the place for asking your website visitor for their contact details in exchange for a well-written whitepaper that explains the details and benefits of your product or technology.
This is where we explain that with VMware, you increase utilization of your existing hardware from under 5% to 80%+ thanks to the hypervisor technology that isolates applications and virtualizes resources — so that you understand how I will deliver on my “better performance at 10% of the cost” promise. Or that with SAP, you will be able to increase the productivity of your employees and get analytical insights that will drive better decisions and positively influence your company’s performance.
If you manage to convince me that your future is still appealing after learning its finer details, it is achievable and affordable for me — you have all but closed the sale already. And isn’t it the ultimate purpose of marketing?
So, teach your marketing team the 222-rule, and start seeing better conversions at each stage of your funnel!
