Contented #12: Notes from My Inbox

Building Marketing orgs, don’t-make-me-think, buttons, food for thoughts, and I am not a typo

Aug 26, 2024

👋 Welcome to Contented, your newsletter curating insights and knowledge delivered to my inbox from 100+ experts in Content, Marketing, and leadership.

Like many Marketers eager to learn, I subscribe to and end up with so many unread newsletters in my inbox every day. Contented is here to help me actually consume the knowledge that I want myself to consume, and at the same time, share them with fellow Content Marketers who might also find it helpful.

I added a couple of new highlights to this week’s Contented: A powerful campaign and a book I recently read. Don’t worry, I’m keeping the usual parts of the newsletter as concise as possible. Very demure, very mindful 😌

Here is what I have been learning from last week:

Building B2B startup Marketing orgs from 1 to 25+

Another super insightful, actionable playbook by Emily Kramer’s MKT1 Newsletter:

Your team must create value-add fuel and craft a well-running engine for your specific audience, in your specific market. Your fuel needs to be custom-made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom-made for your fuel.
To balance fuel and engine successfully, you also need a “foundation.” This foundation—based on your specific product, audience, and market—drives both fuel and engine strategy.

Adding the “Producer” roles: They connect the dots between foundation, fuel, and engine by running campaigns, managing projects, and providing feedback to the individual teams. They basically take your Marketing ingredients and make sure they are distributed well.
Balance out the fuel and engine: Early Marketing teams should alternate their hiring plans between fuel and engine. They also need to constantly assess gaps and overlaps of the teams’ existing skill sets, roles, and responsibilities and make hiring changes accordingly.
Go from π-shaped to specialists: Hire Marketers who spikes in one to two areas and have enough understanding to work with freelanced specialists to augment their skills sets in other areas. As the team scales, start bringing specialization in-house.

Also: Don’t be afraid to layer people–The first Marketer on the team doesn’t need to be the most senior in hierarchy. Identify when it’s time to bring in someone more senior (a VP) or experienced (a team lead) will help the Marketing org scale smoothly.

6 “Don’t Make Me Think” examples that lead to better conversion

This week’s Product Growth newsletter from Aakash Gupta and Kunal Thadani features an UX principle that could also be useful in copywriting:

The "Don't Make Me Think" Growth Lever is about minimizing cognitive load for users and prioritizing UX from a first-principles approach. It involves:
Eliminating friction in user journeys
Anticipating user needs before they arise
Simplifying complex processes without losing functionality
Guiding users intuitively through your product

The six before/after examples essentially have the following traits in common:

Focus less on what you offer (e.g. Scratch the list of USPs on a free-trial sign-up page)
Spotlight users’ follow-up questions up front (e.g. They want to know what happens after a free trial, so show them a price. They want to know the approval process, so show them an overview.)
Identify the immediate action users want to take, and bring them one step closer (e.g. If they’re signing up to do X, don’t make them first wait for Y to happen.)

Make your CTA buttons about your audience

This week’s Greg’s Letter covered interesting tweaks to conversion buttons that had me thinking all about how we phrase CTAs:

Our button says “Book a Call.” But nobody wants another call on their calendar. What they want is solutions, ideas, breakthroughs. Let’s make it about them. We changed it to “Request a Brainstorm.” Our conversion rate jumped from 1.5% to 4.2% overnight.

Spot the difference between “asking your audience to take an action” and “offering them something they want.” A button that says “Buy Now” is practical yet neutral. “Get Dressed Up” might appeal more emotionally to an audience finding cute occasion outfits.
Understand your audience to craft your CTAs. People buy so that they can live a better version of themselves, their work, and their goals.
Don’t overdo it. It’s not always the case that your audience wants second- or third-order benefits of your offering. Balance “fluff” with desire.

#IAmNotATypo campaign

The I Am Not A Typo campaign struck a chord that I didn’t realize existed. My legal name is often considered a typo on my devices, and gets auto-corrected to all sorts of “educated” guesses that I don’t recognize. It’s such a minor annoyance since I usually go by Carol. At the same time, it is also a minor alienation of someone who doesn’t exactly sound like the English- and German-speaking society she lives in.

I do rely on auto-correct to help me sound cohesive and spell out those ridiculously looooong German words when I text on my phone or Slack my colleagues. We don't need to cancel auto-correct, and there's probably a way to mark my name to not be auto-corrected that I didn't bother figuring out.

For me, it's not about putting it on the tech giants to "make the tech better." The significance of this campaign is that we are raising awareness around this topic and recognizing that a society can be way more complex and diverse than the common, daily language it speaks and uses.

A book I recently read

Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter is not your regular how-I-succeed-in-big-tech memoir, but an extremely authentic, honest, and funny recount of how she struggles through success at Amazon. I read it as I am onboarding to a new company, and was grateful how candid someone with her seniority is about the chaos, insecurities, and absurdity of a woman starting and climbing up in a demanding tech job.