Marketing Tapas

Next Thursday, April 25, the Boston Sales and Marketing Innovators (SAMI) meeting (sorry, it’s sold out)  will host Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift. Drift provides the most sophisticated website chat tool, which has AI capabilities to initially manage conversations at scale and figure out if the person wants to talk to sales, customer support, or has some other issue. In just five years over 150,000 companies have adopted Drift and many have reported significant increases (10-25%) in website leads and sales.

I’ve read the Conversational Marketing book that Dave co-authored with David Cancel, Drift co-founder and CEO. My take is that chat is not really marketing (unless you consider sales part of marketing). What makes chat so successful from a revenue point of view is that it re-inserts sales early in the decision making process, as it used to be. Because of the ability of people to do research on the Internet without interacting with a company, they now often wait far longer to talk to sales. Some estimates say that people are perhaps two-thirds of the way through the buying process before talking to sales. Now chat is enabling sales to get involved with buyers much earlier, while they’re doing their research, as they did in the good old days. But in a different way.

The title of Dave’s talk to SAMI is “15 Conversational Marketing Secrets that Will Give Your Business an Unfair Advantage” (because of the Meetup meeting title character limit we had to change “advantage” to “edge”). Dave and Drift CEO Dave Cancel are really into the brain science of effective copywriting. In that title I could four devices:

• Starting with a number (or the word “How”) usually produces a better response to an email Subject line, blog post, talk topic, etc.
• “secrets” suggests exclusivity
• “your business” makes it about the reader, as opposed to a more generic “a business”
• “unfair advantage” suggests an exclusive benefit

You can sign up for free Drift Inside tips and watch a half hour video of Dave explaining some copywriting tips here. Nancy Harhut is another terrific speaker on this topic. Here’s a 50-minute talk in which she describes 26 persuasive copywriting tips (no sign up required).

Tiger Woods won The Masters golf tournament, and it’s estimated that the Nike swoosh brand impressions from his clothes alone were worth about $22 million. Nike quickly put out this terrific ad on their current “chasing your crazy dream” theme.