You're the One for Me

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant, and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye, topics from our podcast, and our street knowledge blog.

Happy Monday!

This week on the podcast, I got to chat with my chum Cathy McKnight about persona development, a foundational marketing activity that, as you dive into the process, feeds many of our marketing motions from the events we attend to the keywords we use in PPC.

One of those, of course, is your content and messaging strategy: how can we convey our usefulness and relevance to our audience's needs, problems, and jobs to be done and move them to act?

But of course, this thing needs to be distinctive, especially if you are in a crowded category, and, as we discussed on the podcast, this requires not just a discovery into who we are for but also who we are not for, what we aren’t, what we don’t do and maybe, what we are not good at.

This is way harder than the positive, happy, clappy process of analyzing your features and post-rationalizing how they bring good to the world.

Now, of course, we marketers (and sellers) are often handed a thing that has been developed in a dark basement and told to take this to market… “It’s brilliant; look at the flippers and the flappers.” We need to find the tribe that will love it; a good part of that process is discovering who will not.

For example, the product might be fresh on the market, with very little customer referenceability, case studies, social proof, or market credibility, so it would not be for the mainstream risk-averse.

Building that mainstream trust will be a different marketing problem, but for now, we need to recognize that these folks are not for right now, and we need to aim squarely at the early adopters and the risk-takers in this market.

The challenge in distilling down your value proposition and targeting it to a smaller group is that there will be commercial people and maybe the CEO quite uncomfortable with narrowing the net, as their instinct, and the pressure on the numbers, is to widen it.

Yet, as we know, positioning a thing for everyone means creating something for nobody.

Nobody will get offended by your exact tone of B2Biege, but then no one will get excited by it either.

And they have to get excited.

Recommending you might be a risk for them, either to their workload if your problem isn’t solved by your product (giving them two problems), their personal reputation, or maybe even their career.

Getting over that friction will require some emotional oomph.

Speaking of oomph, the tune this week, that gave us the subject line is a blast from my past; You’re The One for Me by D Train, a classic dance tune that has been re-released in 2024, video below.

And, of course, when it comes to buyer personas, we need them to say, “you’re the one for me”.

Thanks for reading this far, enjoy the rest of your week, and I hope you like some of the links I’ve picked out below.

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Say hello, reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn or my personal website.

This week’s podcast…

The week’s street knowledge….

The Content Advisory Persona Methodology

Below is a link to Cathy’s slides from the webinar we discussed on the podcast, reproduced with her permission ungated. A fantastic resource.

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

D TRAIN from my youth, fresh(ish) for 2024, getting all of our marketing mojos working….