Hi Marketing Friends!
I want to take some time today to help you answer the question, “Why INSERT BRAND.” I'll get into our Why behind Adze shortly, but first let's talk about why it's gotten so hard to explain your Why in the first place.
Defining your brand "Why"
As marketers, we're told early on that we need a Why, and that we need to be able to explain it to prospective customers in one clear sentence. I fully agree with this. Every marketer should be able to do this.
But over the past decade, we've been asked to build more content, on more channels, while keeping the message fresh, staying aligned to trends, and staying relevant as more competitors crowd into the market. None of that is necessarily bad. It's actually a good challenge to have to keep up with what our buyers need. But somewhere along the way, it also led to an overcomplication of our Why.
We now write entire website pages explaining it. We speak to a dozen different outcomes in our ads. We build blog posts, webinars, one-pagers, slide decks, and social posts, all circling the same basic Why. And then we take that one clear sentence and cram it into a 30 character headline, a 125 character meta description, or a three second video hook, and by the time it comes out the other side, it barely resembles the thing we started with.
So before I get into the Why behind Adze, I think it's worth pausing on how to actually find your Why for whatever brand you're marketing.
Here's the simple version. Strip away the channels, the formats, and the character limits for a second, and just ask yourself three questions.
What problem did you personally run into that made you build this?
Who else is running into that same problem right now?
And what changes for them once it's solved?
If you can answer those three questions honestly, in plain language, you have your Why. Everything else, the landing pages, the ads, the decks, is just that same sentence said in different rooms to different people. The mistake is thinking each room needs its own Why. It doesn't. It needs the same Why, translated.
So, let's get into our Why behind Adze.
I spoke a bit in an earlier blog post about why my co-founder, Kash, and I are building Adze, and it comes down to a gap we both kept running into. Me, as a marketer. Kash, as a founder who has built multiple technology companies. Between the two of us, we've used more tools and logins than I can count trying to run marketing well. And every single time, we hit the same wall. We needed more time to piece those tools together, or we needed more people, and we usually didn't have the budget for either one.
That's it. That's the whole origin story. Not a market gap we spotted from a spreadsheet, rather a gap we lived every day.
So why Adze? Adze is the marketing assistant you need, but can't quite justify hiring yet, to be your partner in strategy and execution.
We kept it simple and straightforward, because simple is something marketing doesn't give itself permission to do anymore. Can Adze do more than what's in that one sentence? Sure it can, and I get into the specifics of that in another post. But if you take one thing away from this, let it be this: your Why doesn't need to grow every time your marketing does. It just needs a home base to keep coming back to, no matter how many channels, formats, or character limits try to pull it apart.
That's ours. What's yours?