Last week we shared a tactic about having a brand enemy. A reader (Tim Herbig) reached out to tell us Louis Grenier highlighted an evolution of the same idea.

Don't just fight a brand enemy, fight one of society's monsters.

Because it's clearly a better way to look at it, I thought I'd share that here.

In "Eating The Big Fish," Adam Morgan says:

• Instead of Hinge's "enemy" being Tinder, the monster is endlessly using a dating app instead of actually finding love. Which is why their motto is "Designed to be deleted."
• And for Chipotle, instead of Taco Bell as the enemy, the monster they're fighting is the decline in society's health due to the proliferation of unhealthy food options.
• Or for Liquid Death, instead of the enemy being Dasani or Fiji, the monster is plastic water bottles that end up in landfills because they don't recycle nearly as easily.

Instead of focusing on how you're different from a specific competitor, think about the troubles in society caused by your competitors, and position your brand as the solution.

As Louis said: "Enemies come and go; monsters tend to be more lasting."

PS: If you ever have comments or suggestions about our insights, please respond to the newsletter at any time. We read and appreciate every reply.

In nearly all aspects of life, communication is the most important skill. And writing is the most efficient and effective method of communication—particularly for driving sales.

Here are 10 writing tips to improve your conversion rates:

#1. Make it about them

Don't just talk about your product's features. Instead, talk about what’s in it for your audience.

"Get paid back by friends instantly. No fees."

#2. Make it relatable

Shortcut comprehension—relate your product to something that they already understand.

"Send money like you send texts." 

#3. Cut the fluff

Remove words that don’t add value. Hook their interest as succinctly as possible. 

"Miss the bus? Grab a Lyft." 

#4. Use simple words

Don’t use a $10 word when a $0.05 word will do. Don’t use industry jargon either.

"Get more done in less time."

#5. Be specific

Don't make them do the work. Spell it out for them and make it easy to picture.

"Relax with plush bedding, a spa-like bathroom, and stunning city view."

#6. Use active voice

Active voice results in shorter, sharper sentences. Making it easier to follow and finish. 

"Your client will adore your accurate edits."

#7. Tell a story

Stories are relatable, interesting, and real. Don't make them do the work. Illustrate.

"Little Johnny was failing math. After working with our tutors, he's graduating with honors."

#8. Make it punchy

Steal concepts from poetry. Use literary devices. Chop up sentences. Add rhyme and rhythm.

"One scoop. Once a day. Every day."

#9. Handle objections

Identify the most common objections that come to people's mind and proactively handle them.

"Build a custom website in 20 minutes. Without code."

#10. Be bold

No one identifies with wishy-washy statements. Take strong stances to find your tribe.

"Most companies suck at onboarding."

Implement these in your writing and you'll increase both comprehension and sales.

ChatGPT has proven itself to be amazing at both research and overcoming blank-page syndrome. It's an amazing tool to jumpstart copywriting.

Emphasis on jumpstart. ChatGPT can struggle to come up with completely novel ideas (and can be a bit cringe unless you put in a bunch of work). That’s because ChatGPT was trained on a giant dataset of existing (not necessarily good) content like articles, books, and sites.

That means it can synthesize ideas really well—but it's not the best at imagining (yet). 

So another way to leverage ChatGPT is by using it to identify unoriginal ideas.

Brand strategist Tom Roach tested this out by feeding ChatGPT a variety of prompts asking for unique positioning statements and slogans—all to no avail. 

But by generating those answers, generic ideas became clearer. Tom and his team could eliminate obvious cliches and focus instead on their truly creative ideas. 

Use ChatGPT to cull the herd by identifying and filtering out unoriginal ideas. 

Having trouble positioning your brand in a crowded market?

Here's a tip: Find yourself an enemy.

Basecamp did this for its project management tool. They identified Microsoft Project as its arch nemesis which led to their focus on collaboration—something Microsoft didn’t do well.

Having a brand enemy is more than just identifying a competitor. It's about finding the very antithesis of your company so you can:

• Sharpen your brand’s messaging and positioning,
• Which will help your audience understand your main differentiators.

By positioning your brand in direct contrast to another, your key value props become much more memorable. And you instantly align yourself with their detractors.

A few examples of companies with clear enemies:

• Hinge: Tinder. Hinge’s founder revamped its branding after being put in the same category as "casual" Tinder. Look at Hinge’s tagline: “Designed to be deleted.”
• Chipotle: Taco Bell. Chipotle emphasizes quality over cost with its “food with integrity” message—the total opposite of Taco Bell’s fat- and sodium-heavy menu. This also comes across stylistically in its clean and minimal aesthetic.
• Liquid Death: Dasani, Ozarka, and just about every other mainstream plastic bottled water brand. Liquid Death nails all of these enemies with its “Death to plastic” motto and recyclable aluminum cans.

A tiny mistake cost $100,000 in lost ticket sales.

Two-time Tony Award-winning Ken Davenport was releasing a new play.

As he entered the prices for the seat tickets on Telecharge, he forgot a zero. instead of $169.50 per ticket, he typed in $16.95. (Less than a movie ticket these days.)

The mispriced tickets went on sale, and it took over four hours to find and fix the mistake. Hundreds of tickets sold for over $150 less per ticket.

“We will, of course, honor any tickets purchased at the lower price,” he announced.

However, this was no mistake. It was a clever tactic.

It’s common practice for Broadway producers to give out loads of free tickets to promote a new show. The idea is people go for free and rave about it to friends.

Ken wanted to avoid this.

He remembered reading a story about American Airlines accidentally selling £6,118.92 tickets for less than £100— and it got a ton of publicity. Obviously.

“What if I do this ‘mistake’ on purpose?” he thought.

So he did. And instead of giving those tickets away for free, he sold them for $17 each, AND got a ton of free publicity. 

This same tactic will likely never work again. But, this is a lesson to question your restraints. Work from first principles. Let the world inspire you. And be creative.

(And yes I fed a photo of Ken Davenport into Midjourney and told it make him 3D and cry.)

Not all backlinks are created equal.

Here are seven types you should prioritize building for better off-page SEO.

1. Editorial links—the most valuable: When other sites cite you as a source. Apart from earning them organically, you can get these via HARO or connecting with journalists directly (discussed last week).
2. Guest posts: These are best to do on authoritative sites that your target audience would read. And make sure you make them really good.
3. Relationship-based links: Say you’ve received a link from a reputable site. If you reach out to the site owner with an offer to contribute more info it could lead to more links in the future. The point isn’t to negotiate for links, but to become a reliable source for journalists and writers.
4. Business profiles: Links from business directories and social media profiles (think Crunchbase and Yelp). You can create these links yourself, but don’t go so far as to get them from irrelevant, unheard of directories.
5. Public speaking: Taking part as a guest on podcasts, webinars, online courses, and conferences not only creates natural linking opportunities—it also builds your expertise (important since Google’s algorithm looks for EEAT).
6. Embedded asset links: Think tools, widgets, awards, and badges that other site owners embed onto their sites.
7. Reverse backlinks: This is a concept Brian Dean from Backlinko talked about. Instead of reaching out about backlinks, create content that people can't help but link to. Original research is the big lever here—other articles will cite your findings.

And avoid:

• Link farms or other low-quality sites.
• Posting on forums without meaningfully adding to the discussion.
• Paying for links (against Google's ToS).
• Sites that add "nofollow" tags to their external links. No real point since it won't count!

Like most advice we'll give, focus on quality.

We process images upwards of 60,000x faster than text. (That range varies hugely depending on the paper. So let's say... much faster.)

Yet the most common marketing mistake we see is:

Focusing on features and tech specs, rather than the outcome.

Show don't tell. Show your customer what life looks like when your product has solved their problem. They're not dumb—they can figure out what's better about it.

For example:

This video from True Classic's website does it perfectly. It shows you immediately how much better you'll look with a better-cut shirt.

They could have said:

• Flattering fit
• Hugs arms & shoulders
• No-stretch collar

Oh, wait they do. But they do that on the product page—after you've already seen the transformation and you know how much better the shirts look.

You want people to go "ohhhh, I get it."

Yes, I know, this is harder for service-based businesses and intangible products. You can't show them saving money with cheaper accounting software. This is one of the reasons testimonials are powerful. People share their transformation story.

So focus on the transformation and the outcome—use imagery if you can.

Most startups ignore branding. It keeps getting punted because, frankly, other things seem more important.

Things like: quick-win ad campaigns and social posts. Things you can point at and say, "Look at all the clicks/views this got."

The problem with that thinking is that, while you might get short-term sales activation, without a brand strategy, you’ll miss out on long-term sales growth.

Besides thinking brand strategy isn’t urgent, people put it off because they think it's not attributable.

That’s the performance-marketing mentality: If I can’t measure it, I don’t need it.

Yes, brand is harder to measure than email open rates and sales. But there are metrics you can use to gauge the success of your brand strategy. 

Here are five that we think are solid indicators of brand performance:

• Branded keyword search volume: If, before doing any brand work, you had ~100/month Google searches for your brand name, and all of a sudden you've got 1000s, then your brand work is paying off.
• Organic social mentions: If people are shouting you out or recommending you, that's a pretty good sign that you're building brand awareness.
• Click-through rates: An improvement in CTRs could mean that people are already more familiar with your brand—and more likely to click through on an ad by you.
• Sales timeline (for B2B): If people are already aware of your company when they come to you, you should have a tighter sales cycle from first contact to close.
• Conversion rates: As your brand builds trust and affinity, it'll be easier to convert more of the people who come across your products.

Track those five metrics for clearer brand attribution. And if you can improve those, you'll improve your CAC and CPA as well ;)

Links from high-authority domains continue to be a positive signal to Google. So getting a quote and link back to your site in a Reuters article can have a positive impact on your SEO.

A good way to get quotes and links used to be HARO, the marketplace where reporters get questions answered in exchange for quotes. Unfortunately, HARO has become inundated with spammy link builders.

So reporters often turn to other channels (like Twitter & LinkedIn) to gather quotes.

Here's a strategy to connect with reporters directly (and for free):

1. Create a list of journalists. Study the top publications in your niche, and check out their employees' portfolios on LinkedIn. 
2. Send personalized messages to them. Ask a question, or give a compliment related to a recent article. Do not pitch your expertise. The goal is to start a conversation. 
3. Either DM them on Twitter/LinkedIn or email them. (If their email addresses aren't public, you can try using tools like Hunter or Voila Norbert to find them.)
4. If they respond (some won't), send a reply that:
5. Thanks them for their time.
6. Gives a brief summary of who you are and your qualifications. Things that make you seem like a baller.
7. Mentions that you’d love to act as a source for future articles if that would be helpful. Include your phone number and email address.
8. Be responsive. Reporters need to publish things quickly, so you'll need to act fast if they follow up.

This strategy requires some sweat equity—but it is free. You can also hire a VA to do the manual parts.

The team at Pixar uses a simple framework to help develop their story lines: 

Once upon a time, ___________________. Every day, ___________________. Until one day, ___________________. Because of that, ___________________. Because of that, ___________________. Until finally, ___________________.

Let's use our Un-ignorable Challenge as an example:

1. Once upon a time, Alice, a founder of a creative agency, was on top of the world.
2. Every day, she'd do sales calls for inbound leads and crush her client work.
3. Until one day, a recession hit and cut inbound leads by 2/3rds.
4. Because of that, she needed to increase leads, or else she'd have to lay off staff.
5. Because of that, Alice started posting on LinkedIn and Twitter. Most of her posts flopped—but a few did well and brought in leads, but she had a tough time running a business and creating good content consistently.
6. Until finally, she joined the Un-ignorable Challenge to learn how to systematically create content that resonates with her audience.

The result: She's increased lead volume and humanized her brand by becoming the face of her agency. She's made interesting and valuable friendships and partnerships.

This framework explains the value of your product. It helps you think through the exact person you're helping and problem you're solving. 

Try it out for your brand!

And if this story resonates with you, enrollment is open for the Un-Ignorable Challenge!

From April 6th to May 5th, buyer's psychology expert Katelyn Bourgoin and I will be teaching founders and creators how to build an audience of future buyers. And how to get into a publishing habit and stick to it. 

Enroll today. Enrollment closes tomorrow at midnight Pacific Time.

We love nuance. But nuance sucks when you just wanna take action. Here's an 80/20 way to land on an influencer marketing strategy.

First, ask these four questions:

1. What exactly are you looking for from an influencer partnership? Choose only one: content, revenue, or brand awareness.
2. What’s your main KPI? $$$, subscribers, demos, eyeballs?
3. What’s your budget?
4. If you’ve got an influencer in mind, do they have a record of delivering on what you’re looking for?

Use these answers to choose which influencers to partner with for the best ROI.

Three guiding principles based on your main objective:

• If you’re looking for reusable content, prioritize nano-influencers and small-time creators who can create TikTok-style ads for $200-$350.
• If you want to drive revenue, identify macro-influencers with strong engagement—take a look at their comments to find this out. Expect to pay $10-$15k for 100k views on YouTube or Instagram.
• If you want to increase brand awareness, you’ve got two routes:
• Parade: Send your products to a lot of nano-influencers. This is ideal for companies that don’t have much budget but have low product costs.
• Revolve: Identify a few big influencers (600k+ followers) for long-term partnerships requiring content creation. This is best for companies with big budgets and products that are too expensive to give freely in bulk.

There's a ton more nuance to every bulletpoint, but this is a great place to start.

What doesn't work: Just dumping a link to your newsletter in a post or your bio. 

Mix up your strategy by trying one or more of these three creative methods.

1. Newsletter ad break – Twitter

Threads are all the rage (see the Something Fun today)—and they often end with a signup CTA. But people often leave before they get there.

So instead of making this CTA your final tweet, try plugging your newsletter in the middle. Example here.

2. Before-after – LinkedIn and Twitter

Share a new issue of your newsletter on these two occasions:

1. The day before you send it: Give a sneak peek of what it’ll cover. Tell users to sign up so they can find out more.
2. The day after sending: Broadly recap what your email covered. Then encourage users to sign up so they don’t miss the next one.

Here’s an example from Justin Welsh:

3. Leverage social proof – everywhere

Whenever you get a nice review/testimonial, take a screenshot and use it to promote your newsletter (or product!). Often, this causes your biggest fans to flock and give you even more reviews/testimonials to use too.

Katelyn Bourgoin does this a lot:

Here, let's just start with an image:

“I see you started an order but didn’t get around to completing it. Here’s a free one to try...”

When asked whether this tactic worked, KetoneAid's founder Frank said:

“The cost of posting a can is $10. People get hooked and buy subscriptions. And the lifetime value of a subscriber is $3,000.”  

For a kinda strange new product that people aren't sure they're gonna like, they definitely want to try it before committing to a $79 12-pack. 

This tactic does a few things:

1. Handles buyers' biggest objection—knowing if they'll like it.
2. Surprises and delights people—and as we've said, delight is the best way to build brand loyalty.
   
3. Gives them a coupon for free shipping to sweeten the deal further.
4. Humanizes the brand. Frank's upfront about it costing $50 normally. It uses his name and is written in first person (even the coupon code uses his name).

"If you sell to everyone, you sell to no one." – Common saying remixed many ways.

Most startups get a bad case of shiny objective syndrome: trying to collect a bunch of wins, and sacrificing focus in the process. Examples:

Product: They want to have a “rich feature set.” Which turns into a feature dump.‍

Messaging: They want to make as many sales as possible. Which results in distilled messaging that connects with no one. 

The almost-inevitable result: The team spreads itself too thin, employees feel lost, and growth suffers.

Three ways to overcome shiny objective syndrome:

#1) Define your core persona. Make it niche—almost scarily so.

Lenny Rachitsky calls this the “super-specific who.” Examples he shares from companies’ early days:

• Substack: “successful veteran online newsletter writers”
• Cameo: “B-list athletes in Chicago”

#2) Define your north star metric and the levers that move it.

Examples:

• Monthly active newsletter subscribers
• Orders
• Number of transactions per week
• Percentage of paid subscribers

What levers affect active newsletter subscribers?

• New monthly subscriber rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Email bounce and spam rate
• Open and click rates

So, if active newsletter subscribers is the North Star Metric, every one of your growth initiatives should be centered on those levers.

#3) Try fewer channels for more concentrated growth.

Don't invest in Twitter, TikTok, SEO, influencers, Facebook Ads, and cold emails all at once.

Look for the one or two channels that have the greatest chance of success, given your specific goals and constraints.

The seven criteria we recommend considering are: scale, targetability, effort, time to results, intent, context, and cost.

Nail one, scale it up, systemize it, and only then move on.

Imagine you own a mountainside rental property and want to attract more applicants. Which of these statements do you find more useful when writing the listing?

1. George is a single 32-year-old software engineer in Philadelphia. He has a bachelor’s degree, earns $120k/year, and lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his pet dog.
   
   
2. George is feeling cooped up working from his downtown apartment—with very little green space for his energetic border collie.

We’re guessing #2.  

Knowing that, you would emphasize that your property is dog-friendly, has a yard, and has many nearby nature trails and excellent Wi-Fi.

Then why do we all build customer personas that sound like #1? Focused on demographic details like age, education, and profession.

It’s not that this info is irrelevant—but you’ll attract more of your ideal customer when you focus your messaging around your customers’ frustrations and motivations. Not their demographic and firmographic details.

Otherwise you get this:

 When developing personas, prioritize answering these questions:

• What are prospects stressed about?
• Where are they looking for solutions?
• What solutions are they trying, and what are their shortcomings?
• How do prospects describe success?
• What are they nervous about?

These questions follow the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework, a customer-centered approach where companies focus on meeting users’ real-life needs, aka jobs. Use it to pinpoint where and how your product provides the most value.

You likely have oodles of sales pages on your site, but do you have an “Objection Smasher?” 

This is a landing page that lists the top 5-10 reasons why people don’t buy your product or why they churn.

Seems like a potentially bad idea telling people how you don't live up to expectations, right?

So, what’s the point of creating an Objection Smasher? 

I bet whenever you buy something, you almost always consider multiple products or vendors. And so do your leads.

And since every company is trying to sell to them, they’re usually wary when companies claim that their "the best," or that they're for everyone. 

An Objection Smasher builds trust and credibility with potential buyers since it acknowledges upfront why others churn or choose another business over yours.

And you can even weigh in to explain why certain customers aren’t a good fit for your product, or what you’re doing to improve your product further.

Here are a few examples of Objection Smashers:

• Drift’s article, “4 Reasons Customers Quit Drift in 2017,” lists their top customer complaints and then explains how they’re tackling these issues.
• Monday.com chooses a slightly different angle by naming Salesforce as its best alternative.

The Objection Smasher addresses common objections and builds trust—so chances are the leads who see it yet still continue to move down your marketing funnel will actually convert.

In April, I'm joining the final cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy from Ali Abdaal (a YouTuber with nearly 4M subscribers clearing about $5M/year in revenue—nuts).

In preparation for that, I've gone through Ali's "YouTube for Beginners" course. 

Here are 3 things I've learned about content creation: 

1. Be an archaeologist, not an architect

There are two ways to approach creating content:

1. Be an architect. Have everything perfectly planned before breaking ground. For example, scrutinize your topic, audience, offer, and format before ever posting.
2. Be an archaeologist. Just start digging holes. When you find treasure, put all your focus there. For example, start making things that interest you, and when you find something that resonates, double down.

Most successful creators got there by just getting started and fumbling around. It took Ali one year and 50 videos to hit 1,000 subscribers. It took MrBeast years. They figured it out along the way. 

As Ali says: "The first 50 videos are for you. The next 50 are for your audience." 

2. Don't create for algorithms. Create for people.

Sure, we write about tactics every week. But what really makes a product or piece of content outpace others is by being exceptional.

So to grow your YouTube channel (or Instagram, or Twitter, or blog):

1. Create an enticing thumbnail and title so people will watch/read it.
2. Make the content interesting and engaging throughout.
3. Leave people satisfied so they click on your next post.

It's simple in theory, but incredibly hard to actually do. It takes a ton of practice, and so...

3. The reps are more important than anything

When you're getting started with a new skill, the quantity and frequency of practice are more important than the quality of each session. Whether that's creating videos, crafting Twitter threads, writing newsletters, or building a product—it's better to do it often and consistently.

Focus on developing the habit first. Then double down on getting good. 

As Ali puts it: "Get going → Get good → Get smart."

–––

Now, if you want to join me in the April cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy to learn how to build a channel to 100k subscribers, make sure to sign up this week. Enrollment closes this Friday—and it's the last cohort they're ever doing.‍

(In full disclosure, I got to join because I promised to write about what I learned!) 

– Neal

To continue the trend of 3's...

Duolingo is famous for perfecting the art of gamifying something that’s good for you.

As the Duo team was figuring out how to gamify language learning, they looked to a logical source for inspiration: games.

Including Gardenscapes, a Candy Crush-esque mobile game the team was hooked on.

One thing Gardenscapes had that Duo didn’t was a “moves counter,” which showed users the dwindling number of moves they had left to complete a level.

After months of work, Duo launched their own moves counter—then “expectantly waited for an unmitigated success,” according to Duo’s former Chief Product Officer Jorge Mazal. 

But what actually happened?

Pretty much nothing. Retention and DAUs stayed the same. User feedback was…well, there was hardly any.

As you know, every experiment is a chance to learn. So here’s what Mazal learned from it:

“Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself:

1. Why is this feature working in that product?
2. Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context, i.e. will it translate well?
3. What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?”

Asking those three questions led the Duo team toward gamification gold, with features like a FarmVille 2–esque leaderboard and irresistible streak rewards.

When you find a feature you love in another product, ask those questions before trying to implement it in your own product. They’ll lead you to what Mazal calls “the right balance of adopting and adapting.”

In honor of the less hyped-up 3-leaf clover ☘️, here are 3 rules of 3 we recommend following. 

The rule of 3 in advertising:  

Never include more than three pieces of information in an ad. Example: This ad from Biddyco has: 1) a before & after, 2) product features, 3) a review. Brand awareness magic!

The rule of 3 in copywriting:  

Three is the minimum number that makes a pattern, and people are pattern seekers. Group items in threes to make them more memorable.

The 3 (science-backed) rules of good writing (via Ariyh):

1. Use short, common, concrete words.
2. And short, simple sentences with active voice.
3. To keep your readers’ attention, keep your tone excited, anxious, or hopeful. People are more likely to continue reading if their emotions are stirred up, versus language that’s less stimulating—or just sad.

Each of those rules is pretty straightforward, right? A nice reminder that simplicity packs a powerful punch.

(Btw, there are a LOT of threes in marketing. There’s also the 3% rule and the cult of three clicks! Are there other rules of 3 you use and love?)

When we think of product gamification, we usually think of B2C apps and referral programs—Duolingo being one of the shining examples of gamification done right.

Turns out gamification can also work for B2B SaaS products.

Just take a look at the B2B scheduling software company Deputy. It gamifies onboarding tasks as part of its free trial:

What do users earn for completing tasks? Extra days for their trial.

It’s a total win-win: Users get to extend their trials and along the way, become more likely to reach the “aha” moment of product activation. Aka the turning point where the odds of becoming a paying customer spike—because they saw actual value from the product.

If you offer a free trial for a SaaS product, consider giving this strategy a shot.