Marketing: Writing to your audience, not your product

When marketing a product or service online, know your audience first.

One of the first thing you learn as a journalist or individual in the marketing field, is that knowing your audience is key to your success. You may very well have the coolest thing since the sliced bread (in this case magnets), but if you don’t know how to speak to your audience, they simply won’t care.

A perfect example of this is Reddit. Their users are often a certain grouping of internet savvy individuals, and it’s not incredibly easy to fool them for your benefit. These types of people require a totally transparent interface, and often incorporating memes (a meme is much like an inside joke). An employee who worked for Netflix surprised Reddit users with a question and answer session, and in turn drastically improver their face value.

Sunday, September 19, a competitor to the popular magnets called Buckyballs attempted to reach out to the Reddit user base in hopes to avoid a legal battle.  Zen Magnets, a very similar product is being threatened by Jake Bronstein.

Forgive me, but I’m about to source Wikipedia. Apparently Bronstein is a marketer of sorts. He also was previously on the terrible MTV show Road Rules, and is known for his publicity stunts. From what I can tell, there is no relation to Bronstein and Zen magnets, so it’s unlikely this is another publicity stunt (still quite possible).

Regardless of Bronstein’s past, Zen Magnets displayed a public inquiry to BuckyBalls. Not only was this a public inquiry, it was geared directly to the regular Reddit user. As you can clearly see in the image above the use of the troll face over his own (it was in for only a few frames), sarcastic or witty humor, and scientific reasoning make for a common posting on Reddit’s frontpage. By including an ever popular meme, and speaking on the level of the regular user, it quickly hit the frontpage (which is no easy feat). The item was also placed in the appropriate sub-reddit /funny. Clearly the author of the message intended this to be as humorous take on the legal threats from BuckBalls.

The results are quite clear from the Reddit users, not only are they agreeing that legal threats against Zen Magnets is absurd, but the way it was done was in poor taste. Additionally, this event has more then likely increased peoples awareness of the product directly from the post. It’s also hard to measure the residual effects from word-of-mouth sales unless you have referrer statistics. Regardless, the company definitely saw an increase in sales this weekend.

Anthaneezy - ”and for content sake, i am a buckyball set owner (the bad guys). with crap like monster cable flexing its muscle on smaller companies, and not even competitors, i will make a statement and purchase a set of zen magnets. products should let the quality and performance speak for themselves, not lawyers.”

Zen Magnets clearly came out on top in this situation, especially because nobody from buckyball decided to respond, yet. Responses to the issue on Twitter are also similar to the ones on Reddit, which already show a word-of-mouth campaign working well in their favor.

Advertising, or creating awareness should always been done in this manner. Obviously not the sarcastic wit that Reddit users are accustom to, but gearing your message to the audience. This is especially important when you are on other peoples turf. It’s perfectly acceptable to write in common or even boring language on your own product/services website. Write for your products personality.

[Reddit Thread]

Anandymous- I had no idea what either product was until I saw this video and I am glad I did. I went ahead and ordered a set of these.