Nobody Cares About You – And That’s Liberating for Your Marketing
The moment you stop making your company the hero, your marketing gets a hell of a lot more useful — because people are looking for answers, not another self-important sales pitch.
No one wakes up thinking about your company.
We wake up staring at our own navels; worrying about our own problems, looking for answers to our own questions, trying to get through the day with fewer hassles and better results.
That’s not bad news for your marketing.
It’s liberating.
I co-created a sponsored webinar program in the late 2000s that is still running in essentially the same format. My role was to host, recruit an expert to present, and work with the sponsor (they got 5 minutes and a chance to chime in during the Q&A) and speaker to make sure the session flowed and the audience got value.
I must’ve given “the talk” to 60 or so sponsors over the five years I ran it. One of my regular speakers started calling it that over beers at a conference and the name stuck.
It went like this:
No one cares about you.
No one is registering to hear you talk about how wonderful your product is. They are there to understand the topic at hand and how to address a problem they have. They already know you have a product or service that can help because your logo is right there on the registration page. You need to show that you understand the business problem – the pain they have.
Lead with useful information, not speeds n’ feeds.
You can use the time as you choose because you paid for it, but if you lead with features, folks WILL tune out. I have the survey stats to prove it.
The drop-off in ratings for the folks who ignored me were brutal. We sent a survey link to everyone as we closed each webinar. Overall event approval was about a 4.5; the same for expert speakers, while slightly lower for the sponsors who listened to me.
For those that didn’t, approval dropped into the 2ish range along with comments like “awful sales pitch at the start.” I wasn’t a marketer in those days but I remain semi-curious about any difference in sponsor email outreach (they got one shot at access to the registration list) results for the majority of sponsors who listened versus the 20% or so who chose to ignore me and did their usual song and dance.
I do this for companies — build newsletters that focus on being useful instead of being loud. bduhon@simplyusefulmarketing.co
Nobody cares about your company at the start. They care about whether you understand their problem. Whether you can explain it clearly. Whether you can help.
What are their problems?
What’s keeping them up at night?
What do they despise about the current options on the market?
When you’re wrapped up in proving how smart you are or how impressive your product is, you miss the opportunity to hold a conversation. To listen. To learn. To adapt.
And there’s another benefit.
Competing on price and features makes you sound like a commodity.
Features can be copied. Prices can be matched. Buzzwords get slapped onto every damn thing in sight.
You can see that as vendors in the IDP space (intelligent document processing; where I’ve spent most of my career) slapping “AI” onto their feature set whether it belongs there or not. The result is a blur of sameness. Similar promises. Similar vague claims. Similar bloated language. Customers are left trying to figure out who actually does what — and your sales team gets to clean up the mess.
You’d think these companies would learn; they did the same thing with RPA (robotic process automation) seven years ago.
The company that stands out isn’t always the one shouting the loudest.
It’s the one making the customer feel understood.
The one explaining the problem clearly.
The one focusing on outcomes instead of jargon.
The one proving, over time, that it gives a shit.
That last part matters.
Because when you stop shouting about yourself and start showing up with useful information, something important happens.
People begin to trust you.
Not all at once. Not because of one brilliant webinar or killer LinkedIn post or clever campaign.
Over time.
Familiarity becomes trust.
Trust becomes the reason people remember you when they’re finally ready to buy.
So, yes, nobody cares about you.
Good.
That means you can stop trying to be the hero of your marketing.
Because the hero is the customer; you’re just there to help them complete their journey.
P.S. I help companies stop shouting about themselves and start saying things their customers actually care about. If your marketing is stuck in “speeds-n’-feeds” mode, let’s talk: bduhon@simplyusefulmarketing.co.