Dream-fulfilling marketing is a stunt worth trying 👼

3 ways to make your audience's dreams come true

🇮🇱 Personal note:

Israel is at war. Over the last week, EVERYONE has seen the horrors made by Hamas and its allies. It's unreal. My friends and I have been on our feet 24/7, volunteering wherever needed, be it supplying food to our troops or getting the real story out to the world.

Working on this newsletter today gave me a little bit of ‘escapism’ from this hell. It was kind of like therapy for me. I'm grateful to all 2,000 of you, my readers, for giving me a reason to break away, even momentarily, from the nightmarish reality. Even while writing this, my wife and I had to run to shelters due to a missile attack on Tel-Aviv (where we live).

But despite their attempts, they can't break our people. Never.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for your continued support for Israel 💙

Now, with a newfound sense of purpose, let's dive into this week's marketing idea.

🧚🏻‍♀️ What is “Dream-Fulfilling Marketing”?

Last year, email marketing startup Loops faced a challenge:

They wanted to get meetings with their target audience—marketing managers and founders at early-stage startups—but they had a limited budget and no brand recognition.

• Q: How do you get people to talk to you when they don't know who you are?

• A: You make their dreams come true.

For Loops’ customers (small startups with about ~10 employees), getting featured on Times Square is a dream beyond reach. And that’s precisely what they did.

Even though it has nothing to do with their product, Loops made this dream come true for their audience—by doing the following:

1. They made a webpage asking people to send their logo & tagline by email.

2. They shared this webpage on Product Hunt.

3. They put those logos on a Times Square billboard they rented for a few hours.

4. They sent a photographer to take photos.

5. They posted all the photos on their Twitter page.

🤯 Here’s Why It’s Genius

First, it created an email conversation with their audience. Those who submitted their logos via email were marketing managers or founders, precisely their target group. And the Loops team could now follow up on these email conversations.

Second, it built a powerful brand image. The featured marketing managers now felt like heroes within their companies (as they brought their company to Times Square for free).

Third, Loops didn't stop at email; they shared all the photos on Twitter in a thread, making it appear as if these companies had genuinely advertised on Times Square (i.e. “randomly caught your ad on Times Square”). This boosted their Twitter growth.

Oh, and it wasn't as costly as you might think. Each logo and tagline appeared for just 10 seconds, thanks to the self-serve bidding system, Blip, for short Times Square ads.

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🏰 Quick Guide: Dream-Fulfilling Marketing 101

Usually, making your audience's wildest dreams come true isn't something you can scale, a valid business model, or sustainable. But if it's a one-time thing, it's perfect.

So, here's the trick:

1. Find a jaw-dropping WOW moment for your target persona, even if it's not related to your product (3 examples below).

2. Do it for a small group that fits your target persona and for a limited time.

3 powerful ways to do it yourself

Once you’ve identified your target persona, do one of these tactics:

1. 🦸🏻‍♀️ Make them company heroes: Make your target persona the hero of their company by granting them something they couldn't get otherwise. It should be unrelated to your product and exceedingly generous—something that couldn't sustain a long-term business model. Think Times Square billboards like Loops.

2. 🤑 Help them earn more: For instance, Nas.io focuses on monetizing communities. Community managers dream of earning from their communities. So Nas.io made this dream real by giving huge prizes to successful community managers.

2. 🏆 Praise them: Boost their personal brand. Make them famous. Showcase your persona on your brand's social media channels, positioning them as experts in their field. This is an insanely powerful marketing idea of its own, so I'll dive into it in a future article.

In a nutshell, “Dream-Fulfilling Marketing” is all about making overly generous acts for a specific group in your target audience. As smart people have said before: Do things that don't scale.

In Times Square, from better times

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See you next week (hopefully) ✌️

Tom