Let’s start this core training with a thought experiment.
If you were to get one hundred of the best marketers into a room and ask them to distill marketing down to its core components, you’d hear variations of two words: audience and offer.
(It’s no coincidence that the largest digital marketing conference in the world is called “Traffic & Conversion” — synonyms for audience and offer.)
And, to be clear, there’s a lot of wisdom in that answer.
There’s an elegant simplicity in focusing on audiences and offers as core concepts in marketing.
Match the right offer to the right audience, and everything works.
Get the offer or the audience wrong, and nothing works.
However, from our perspective, distilling marketing down to audience and offer is true but incomplete. They’re both necessary but not sufficient to achieve world-class results.
There’s something missing — and that something often is the difference between success and failure, or amazing results vs. mediocre results.
What’s the missing ingredient?
We’re glad you asked.
More than four decades of combined experience have confirmed — over and over again — that marketing success comes from connecting an interested audience to an irresistible offer by way of an engaging experience.
Read that sentence again (and again and again). Write it somewhere you can see it every day.
Tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids. (OK, don’t do that.)
This seemingly simple idea is at the center of everything we do, and if internalized and acted on consistently, it can transform your marketing results.
Let’s look at each of those three ingredients separately, then we’ll put them together and explain how they work together systemically.
Interested Audience
Our good friend and world-class marketer Jonathan Boyd defines an interested audience as having three characteristics:
- They have a problem to solve.
- They’re motivated to solve it.
- And they’re willing to pay for a solution.
Don’t get hung up on the word “problem” if that has any negative connotations. It’s equally accurate to define audiences with shared desires.
The critical insight here is that interested audiences are actively looking for, interested in, and open to solutions at a specific moment in time.
Seth Godin explains it best — “Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted.”
Or, as we like to say, if you’re going to start a nudist colony, market to people who are already nudists — don’t try to convince people to become nudists!
Irresistible Offer
An irresistible offer is based on a uniquely relevant value proposition that meets emotional, social, and functional needs and desires while minimizing, eliminating, or preventing the most impactful problems and amplifying the most relevant benefits associated with fulfilling those needs and desires.
Irresistible offers create a sense of inevitability when revealed.
“That is exactly what I want…” is the reaction you’re looking for from your audience.
That’s the experience we’re engineering when we connect an interested audience to an irresistible offer.
Engaging Experience
An engaging experience is intellectually interesting and emotionally satisfying.
Engaging experiences often include novelty, curiosity, and surprise — all in service to the larger customer journey.
In general, people are more inclined to buy from other people they know, like, and trust, which means that empathy, authority, credibility, and authenticity are (very) important too.
Engaging experiences pull our audience’s attention forward naturally, organically, and from their perspective — effortlessly — instead of pushing them step by step deliberately.
What’s the difference between push and pull?
Push marketing includes:
- Curiosity-based clickbait ads.
- Over the top promises in headlines.
- “Ethical bribe” lead magnets.
- Fake urgency countdown timers.
Push, push, push…every step of the way…
Pull marketing, on the other hand, is like the experience we have when immersed in a great book, movie, serialized TV show, or conversation.
Our attention is pulled forward naturally because every step of the way, we want to know what’s next…
Like good stories, engaging experiences have an ‘engine’ inside that creates feelings of momentum and progress — we can sense that the journey is going somewhere, and we’re drawn toward that destination magnetically.
“Every single story we write, every single story there is, has an engine inside of it. And it’s a question, an unanswered question that the reader wants to know the answer to. And all these questions are very simple questions, and they’re all a version of ‘What happens next?’ Those three words are what make all narrative go.” — Tom French (Pulitzer Prize winning reporter specializing in serial narratives.)
Push marketing takes constant effort, and the whole system grinds to a halt when that effort stops.
With push marketing, you’re marketing to an audience, and selling is deliberate.
Pull marketing feels like you’re parked on a downhill slope.
The experience is enjoyable. Your audience wants to know what’s next because the entire experience has been engineered to create that result.
How is that possible?
Because you’re taking the audience to a destination you know in advance, and they don’t.
From the moment you capture their attention — and every step along the way — you know exactly where the journey leads…
…what they need to believe at critical decision points…
…how to frame the journey to deliver the most impact and ‘ah-ha’ insights…
…and you’ve created an experience that establishes those beliefs for the right audience while respectfully discouraging the wrong audience along the way.
Think about how powerful that is — it’s the closest we get as marketers to having a superpower.
With pull marketing, you’re marketing with an audience, and selling in this context is emergent.
Now that we understand the individual parts let’s move on to how those parts work together systemically to produce results.
Relationships Among the Parts
A fundamental tenet of systems theory is that it’s the relationships among the parts — not the parts themselves — that create results.
For example, the needs and desires of an interested audience guide the development of an irresistible offer, and the offer is irresistible only to an interested audience…
And the engaging experience that connects interested audiences to irresistible offers is only engaging for the right audience and — you guessed it — the right offer.
All three elements depend on each other.
No part stands alone — and no part can be optimized outside of the context (and function) of the whole system.
Interested audiences, irresistible offers, and engaging experiences are not separate — they’re wholly interconnected.
And that has profound implications for the work we’re doing.
However, before doing that work, we need to orient ourselves to where we are relative to audiences, offers, and experiences.