At MarketingExperiments, we throw around a term a lot when we create content.
That term is “aha.”
I think it’s an extremely helpful term for marketers to understand and employ in their marketing.
But before I explain why it’s helpful, I want to first identify a serious problem in the world of marketing.
Often, even here at MarketingExperiments with our micro-yes inverted funnel, we are simply content to get a “yes” from our potential customers. A “yes” generally means a sale, a lead or a click, depending on where your realm of responsibility lies.
But what we don’t always get when a customer says “yes” is the maximum intensity of that “yes.” This translates ultimately to less momentum through the customer lifecycle, which translates to a lower lifetime value of a customer, which translates to lower revenue in the long term.
If you’ve ever bought a product that you needed because it was the lesser of two evils, you know exactly what I mean.
Cable companies are great examples of this. In most cities in the U.S., there are only one or two cable providers. Because Americans can’t live without their favorite programs, they buy a cable package filled with channels they don’t need and constantly deal with terrible customer service. The cable company got a “yes,” but it’s a low intensity “yes.”
The first opportunity most of those customers get to jump ship, they will.
While no one is really thinking this way, our job as marketers should not just be to get a “yes”; it should be to get the highest intensity “yes” possible for our particular product/service mix.
How do we ratchet up the intensity of a customer’s “yes?”
That’s where “aha” comes in.
What is “aha”?
Unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, when we say it around the offices here at MarketingExperiments, we don’t use it as an exclamation. We use it as a noun.
It’s the thing that produces the exclamation “AHA!” — not the exclamation itself.
“Aha,” for us, is a quality that we seek to embed into all of our content. The more “aha” (the noun) your content has, the more likely your audience is to say “AHA!” (the exclamation).
If they don’t actually say it, you want them to at least feel it. It usually feels like a “yes” but with a rush of endorphins.
It’s the same thing you feel when you hear a great line in a song, read an incredible piece of poetry or listen to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech.”
Of course I’m not comparing our content to the world’s great speeches, poems and songs, but we nevertheless want to produce a similar kind of physical reaction in our audience.
Flint McGlaughlin, Founder and Managing Director, MarketingExperiments, often quotes Peter Drucker who said “adequacy is the enemy of excellence.”
Flint also often says that everything in sales and marketing is “increasing the probabilities” of conversion. In other words, we cannot make decisions for people. All we can do is increase the probability of a decision in our favor.
I want to argue that increasing these probabilities has everything to do with increasing “aha” in our marketing collateral.
In my next post, I’ll show you what I mean with real world examples and give you a framework to think about “aha” as it relates to increasing the intensity (and therefore the probability) of a customer saying “yes” to your offer.
In the meantime, what do you think? Let me know in the comments.
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