So I was asked to write a minithread diving deeper into the synthesis of marketing and investing. Synthesis of concepts can be super powerful, especially when it comes to understanding revenue drivers. Hopefully this will be useful to someone! (YES I DO REQUESTS SOMETIMES)https://twitter.com/LAForeverHall/status/1205997189232656384 …
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3. One rule: focus on the customer. Not yourself. What you can do for them is more interesting to them than what they can do for you. More strongly: focusing on what you can do for the customer IS focusing on what the customer can do for you. You get more by giving more.
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4. Demand can be conjured by making the customer the hero. What benefit will the customer get from buying the product? Is that benefit being explained clearly? Is the advertiser using the proper emotional hooks to make the customer want to buy its products? It’s not about you.
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5. Markets don’t suddenly get efficient away from the stock market. Perceived customer benefits are good enough. A skilled marketer can conflate perception with reality to generate sales in absence of a unique customer benefit. How? Capturing the customer's emotion & identity.
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6. If a copywriter knows your beliefs and how they tie into your identity, they can be used against you. Political campaign mailing lists are a goldmine to copywriters because the campaigns have already done all the hard work for them. Fortunes have been made from their rental.
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7. Used to work in investment newsletters and this was a common tactic there. Often, the emotional hooks are used to sell products that are actually good for customers. But the quality doesn't sell itself. It's the emotion that does. Marketing is manipulative at its core.
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8. You can follow along with a company’s marketing by getting on their mailing lists. A/B testing is industry standard - multiple ads compete against each other to create a “control” that it uses regularly. If you can spot good ads, you can spot inflection in its sales momentum
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9. Alternatively, you can find out which companies are underearning by mismanaging their mailing lists. This is also opportunity, b/c subtle changes in advertising can lead to huge changes in performance. In copy specifically, it’s not uncommon for the best ads to 10x the worst
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11. In comparison, the largest company in the industry can do $20 mil in a week. The ad I wrote about in my copywriting article did $4 or $5 million, written in approx two weeks, for a publisher with sales in the low millions. For
$TST there was CLEARLY room for improvement.Show this thread -
14. With investment newsletters, one sales funnel looks like this. Prospect clicks on ad. Ad takes them to a page full of copy. If they buy, immediately upsell them to another newsletter. Then they get emailed ads for more products. There should ALWAYS be another product.
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15. One differentiatiator between newsletter companies is the quality of the narrative of the ads.
$TST's are generally not great. Lots of basic association with the "Cramer" brand but there is a lack of SCARCITY, URGENCY, and NARRATIVE. The best cos excel at these.Show this thread -
16. Compare and contrast. One of the best ads of any medium, ever, in this YouTube video... And
$TST's campaign linked from their front page. These two aren't directly comparable but$TST has nothing like the ad on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN5BLQLA4FA … https://subscription.thestreet.com/action-alerts-plus?OID=037527 …Show this thread -
17. That's the difference between a billion dollar enterprise and a company making $20 million barely trying. Is the YT ad hyperbolic? Yes. Was it effective? One of the most effective, ever. Even had TV spots! With invisible products, narrative is key.
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18. PS guys just because I’m referencing this stuff and explaining it doesn’t mean I like it. It just exists and since it exists it’s important to understand how it works. If market opportunities exist b/c of it, there’s no reason you shouldn’t trade on it b/c someone else will
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19. Operational improvements in marketing flow through the financials and these inflections can be profitable if you spot them. Financial statements are usually the OUTPUTS of value drivers, not the drivers themselves! Spotting changes in the drivers b4 they show up = edge.
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20. Operational improvements aren’t the only way to synthesize marketing with investing, though. Another way to do so is using your marketing skills to assess how a company is doing in the metagame of narrative management. But that’s a topic for later today...
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End of conversation
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