SELLING OUTCOMES: THE FIRST STEP TO GREAT MARKETING

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Morning!

Is it me or does something feel different around here? Yep. For 3 weeks, I have been telling you I am going to rebrand this newsletter, and finally, we’ve made it to the finish line.

For four and a half years, and 234 articles, this newsletter has been known as ‘Growing Viral’. But at the back end of last year, I didn’t feel aligned with the name my much younger self gave it. The content had changed, I had changed, and I felt like the newsletter needed a bit of TLC - and a name that suited what the content was actually about.

So Growing Viral is dead, and today is the first-ever email from…

🎉 Marketing Archive 🎉

Let me explain the new name, my thesis, and what you can expect from me over the next year - then we’ll get it a corker of an essay I’ve written for this week.

Four and a half years ago, I started this newsletter with the aim of helping me get better at marketing. I knew if I committed to spending a few hours every week writing about different marketing strategies, I’d naturally get better at marketing.

…And I was right. I’m a dramatically better marketer today than I was 4 years ago.

But the more time I’ve spent researching and writing about marketing, the more I’ve realised that the internet today is plagued with terrible marketing advice.

• 24-hour algorithm hacks to get a few more likes

• Made up “Psychology” tactics to boost conversions

• Get rich quick methods for driving more leads

99% of the marketing content I’ve consumed has been, for lack of a better term, utter horse shit.

That said, there was that 1% of great insights I found that have completely reshaped how I think as a marketer. Things I’ve integrated into our campaigns, passed on to our team, and etched into my brain. But that 1% wasn’t found in the viral Twitter threads you read online. Instead, I found it by reading David Ogilvy’s autobiography, Gary Halbert’s letters from prison, and Dave Trott’s marketing seminars.

The best advice I've learned didn't come from people trying to go viral - it came from people sharing the fundamental principles they actually used in their work. Marketing advice that's stood the test of time for 50 years and will still hold true in another 100. That's the marketing worth studying.

So, that’s what I’m on a mission to create.

On MarketingArchive.io (the website is still in the process of being built), I am going to create an archive of the best marketing advice and examples in existence. Then in this newsletter, I am going to share the best advice and examples I found during my research each week.

On Sundays, you’ll get the same essay format you’ve always been getting. A piece of advice from one of history’s greatest marketers + 2-3 marketing examples of how it looks in action.

Plus, I’m also going to start sharing a short mid-week email with mini-insights I’ve saved, bookmarked or picked up that week.

Now, this intro is becoming an essay in itself, so I’m going to wrap it up.

Lastly, I just want to say thank you for reading, supporting, and subscribing to this newsletter. I’ve put 1000s of hours into it at this point and it means the world that you take the time to read it. My biggest aim this year is to make every second you spend reading this newsletter the most valuable time spent in your week.

Now let’s get into the actual essay!

The Essay

When I first started posting on LinkedIn 4 years ago, there was this sales guy on there who was the talk of the town. His name was Justin Welsh, and he’d just left his sales job to become a LinkedIn copywriter. I remember him gaining 100,000s of followers over the year and everyone on the platform worshipping him.

He had this course that I think was called ‘LinkedIn 101’ or maybe ‘LinkedIn OS’ that taught you how to succeed on LinkedIn. It was £100, and Morgan and I decided to buy it to see if it would help us launch our new business on LinkedIn.

The course was good. So good that we decided to share it with our (very small) team at the time as part of their training.

But as I was going through the course, there was one part of it that never felt right to me. His big piece of advice for how to write your LinkedIn headline was to follow a formula that looked something like this:

Which meant our headline should have been something like, “We help B2B brands with their marketing”.

I suppose it was simple, and it did explain what we did. Yet it seemed to contradict everything I was reading at the time. It went against all the fundamental marketing principles of differentiation and trying to stand out. Yet millions of people were switching their headlines to lines that followed his formula. Which kind of sums up the exact point I was making in the introduction.

I am sure Justin is a fantastic man and means well - his course was incredibly valuable for getting started writing on LinkedIn. But I was getting taught quick tricks and essentially, bad marketing habits.

So, how do you promote your business to the world? In a way that isn’t just you saying the service you provide?

Well, in the mid-1960s, there was a Harvard professor by the name of Theodore Levitt who was trying to answer that exact question.

At the time, Levitt was on a crusade against a corporate disease he called "Marketing Myopia." Over the last 20 years, he’d watched as massive railroad companies went bankrupt because they thought they were in the "train business", when they were actually in the "transportation business." Levitt noticed that these railroad companies were so in love with their own steel tracks and steam engines that they had forgotten about their passengers and why they paid their money to them in the first place.

Levitt knew that passengers didn’t pay these companies to sit on their trains. They paid them to be transported to the place they wanted to go (an outcome). So, when trains & planes started to become popular, the railroad companies’ marketing became less and less effective.

The railroad companies needed to stop selling the features of their trains and focus on the outcome their trains provided - transportation.

In his book, ‘The Marketing Mode’, Levitt published a great quote that he borrowed from a 1940s ad man that read…

This was the dawn of the idea of selling outcomes as a marketer.

41 years after Levitt published his book, Steve Jobs used that exact principle to launch one of the most successful tech products in history: the iPod.

While Sony was raving about their MP3 players having “5GB of storage” and “Fast transfer speeds”, Steve launched the iPod with the infamous headline, "1,000 songs in your pocket." An outcome.

Apple went on to sell 450 million iPods and own over 75% of the global MP3 player market.

But Jobs wasn’t the only one to heed Levitt’s advice and turn his company into a global success…

Fast forward to 2010. A new taxi company emerged called Uber. But they didn’t launch into the market talking about their “GPS-enabled logistics” or “on-demand transportation”. Instead, they launched with the headline, "Everyone’s Private Driver." An outcome.

Same principle. Over 50 years on from when Levitt wrote about it.

Quite ironically, Levitt’s book contains many of the same principles I now teach our team every single day. People will tell you that “the world has changed”, that “social media changed everything”, and that “modern-day marketing is different.” And they would be right. But humans haven’t.

We are the same sacks of water we always have been, with the same triggers, the same psychology, and the same things that make us tick.

We were buying outcomes in the 1960s, and we’re still buying outcomes today.

It’s easy for me to just show you examples, but what does it actually look like in practise though? How can we make sure we start selling outcomes rather than features?

The best place to start is by auditing what you're actually saying right now. Pull up your website, your LinkedIn, your pitch deck. Count how many sentences describe what you do versus what the client gets when you're done.

One of my favourite pieces of advice around this is to avoid ever saying “We”.

NOT: We help agencies file their taxes.
INSTEAD: Save money on your taxes.

NOT: We source senior talent for IT firms
INSTEAD: Stop stressing about your next IT hire

It’s not about you. It’s about the outcome customers get from working with you.

Right, that’s all I’ve got for you today. A simple little lesson, but a principle that every marketer should always have at the front of their mind.

Oh, before you go! Reply to this email and let me know what you think of the new name + anything you’d like to see me write about. I am a human, I do reply :)

Until next Sunday,

— Niall

P.S. Can you take a second to rate this essay below? Takes 2 seconds and helps me know what to write.

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