Traffic can’t fix a product problem.
I’ve spent my career building organic traffic. Across every client I’ve worked on, the total is more than 2 billion clicks.
The programs I’ve run helped take DaveRamsey.com from around 280,000 monthly visitors to 3.4 million, and Dr. Axe from 500,000 to more than 12 million.
So take this seriously, because it’s not what a marketing guy is supposed to say.
Traffic can’t fix a product problem.
If people don’t understand what you sell, more traffic just brings you more people who don’t understand it. You pay for every one of them. So a customer can cost more this year than last year… even when every report says the marketing got better.
Everyone’s told you that when sales slow down, you fix the marketing.
Here’s where that’s not true: when nobody on your team can answer 4 plain questions about the product, in writing, in a line or 2 each.
Algorithms don’t buy. People do. And people buy what they understand.
Where the 4 questions came from
I spent 11 long calls with Jay Elliot while we built his book. Jay was a Senior VP at Apple and worked beside Steve Jobs through the Macintosh years.
On our second call I asked him something I’d been saving. If you wrote one letter to a young founder starting a company today, what would you say?
He didn’t talk about raising money. He didn’t talk about marketing either… which surprised me, because marketing is my whole career.
He said “it’s about the product.” Then he asked 4 questions.
They look easy. Jay says they aren’t. In It’s the Product, Stupid he writes:
“The questions are easy to remember and difficult to answer. I have seen a weak answer survive for years behind presentations, technical language, and activity.”
Jay Elliot, It’s the Product, Stupid
Why a weak answer can last for years
It has nothing to do with how smart the team is, or how hard they work.
It has everything to do with this: nobody has to write the answer down.
A slide deck can talk around who the user is for months. A 1-line answer on paper can’t.
That’s the whole mechanism. Short written answers show you exactly where you’re unsure. If it takes half a page to explain who the user is, the book says, “the review has already found something important.”
You don’t fix that with better wording. You fix it by finding out.
And it’s hardest to see from the inside. Before Apple, Jay’s team at IBM built ticket machines for BART, the Bay Area’s new rail system. They knew exactly how the machines were supposed to work. Then close to 1,000 people spent 1 Saturday trying them.
Jay’s verdict: “It was a disaster, an unbelievable disaster.”
The whole story is in lesson 2. So is what it cost to fix.