Marketing

Monday, April 11th, 2011

The Road To Marketing Enlightenment

So for a while I’ve been doing this thing where, when I read a great blog post or a cool business book, I’ll take notes in a black notebook that I keep specifically for that purpose. I’ve found that it helps me to remember what I read, and makes a handy reference when I want to go back and check something for more detail. Think of it as something of a swipe file.

At the same time, since I last wrote I’ve since taken a new job as The Marketing Department at Instructure, a small edu-oriented startup. This new job has shown me just how much my marketing education is lacking. To rectify the situation, I’ve come up with a list of influential advertising and marketing books, which I intend to read and take notes on. This brings me to my point: instead of keeping my notes in my black notebook, I think I’m going to try to keep them on this blog. That way, if you’ve read (or are reading) the same book, you can point out to me the obvious points that I have no doubt that I’ll miss. And maybe, if you haven’t read the book, you’ll still be able to glean some of the wisdom contained therein. At very least, you’ll get to see what happens when I try something I read about.

Also, I make no promises as to frequency of my posts, but I’m hoping for a post a week, at least.

As for my reading queue, here’s the list as it currently stands:

  • “CROSSING THE CHASM” - Geoffrey A. Moore
  • “THE E-MYTH REVISITED” – Michael E. Gerber
  • “ALL MARKETERS ARE LIARS TELL STORIES” – Seth Godin
  • “INFLUENCE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSUASION” – Robert B. Cialdini
  • “MADE TO STICK” – Chip and Dan Heath
  • “TRUST AGENTS” – Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
  • “POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND” – Al Ries and Jack Trout
  • “CRUSH IT” – Gary Veynerchuck
  • “PURPLE COW” – Seth Godin
  • “HEY, WHIPPLE. SQUEEZE THIS: A GUIDE TO CREATING GREAT ADVERTISING” – Luke Sullivan
  • “OGILVY ON ADVERTISING” – David Ogilvy
  • “GOOD TO GREAT: WHY SOME COMPANIES MAKE THE LEAP AND OTHERS DON’T”  – Jim Collins
  • “THE 22 IMMUTABLE LAWS OF BRANDING” – Al Ries
  • “ADVERTISING, SECRETS OF THE WRITTEN WORD” – Joseph Sugarman
  • “THE 22 IMMUTABLE LAWS OF BRANDING” – Al Ries and Laura Ries
  • “WHERE THE SUCKERS MOON: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN” – Randall Rothenberg
  • “THE BOOK OF GOSSAGE” - Howard Luck Gossage
  • “BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING”  – Malcom Gladwell
  • “ICE TO THE ESKIMOS” – Jon Spoelstra

What do you think? Anything I’m missing in here?

(Thanks to AdAge.com and a few other sites and sources for the recommendations.)

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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

5 Easy Steps To Becoming An Authority

Many of you didn’t know this, but the theme on my blog is the first theme I’ve ever hand-coded from scratch (I wanted it to match my resumé). Because I’m a WordPress theme designing n00b I used WPDesigner.com’s WordPress theme tutorial to show me the ropes. It’s a great tutorial that gave me the basics of how WordPress themes are constructed, and I’m already at work on building other themes using the provided knowledge. In fact, his tutorial was good enough that I’m writing this post, in large part, to promote and link to his content!

This experience got me thinking. WPDesigner has an impressively extensive knowledge of WordPress themes. He took that knowledge, broke it down into chunks that are easily digestible for n00bs, and shared it, free of charge. And what has it gained him?

  • He’s getting linked to because it’s great content.
  • He’s getting better search engine rankings because he’s getting linked to.
  • This in turn leads to more links because more people are discovering his tutorial on search engines, finding his tutorial useful, and linking to him.
  • At the end of it all, he’s getting more clients because he’s become an authority by virtue of the fact that he’s posted great content that has become democratically acknowledged as authoritative. This authority gives him credibility, and that credibility gets him business. Furthermore,  people may use his tutorial but find that their technical skill isn’t equal to the results they want. What do they do next? Hire the guy who wrote the tutorial! Talk about good karma for sharing a little bit of knowledge!

Want more evidence? I could substitute SEOMoz.org for WPDesigner in the above story for when I was learning SEO and it’d be about the same. Their awesome free SEO content for n00bs (and even old veterans) drives sales to their premium tools and forum, and gives them credibility to land major consulting clientele.

So what does this mean to you? Try this 5-step process:

  1. Think about what you do. What are your core competencies? What you you know a lot about, or what are you an expert in?
  2. Come up with a body of content. How would you share what you know with someone who didn’t know anything about it, but wanted to learn? What things are helpful, and what things are just too advanced?
  3. Decide how to break up the content into easy-to-understand chunks. Write it as an ongoing series on your blog. Publish it in one chunk as a guide or blueprint. Do whatever makes the most sense. But whatever you do, make sure it’s easy to follow.
  4. Promote your content to beginners. Go to where people are asking questions online (think niche-oriented forums, Yahoo Answers, or LinkedIn Answers). You’ll have opportunities to share your knowledge and point questioners to the resource you created for them. In the process, you’ll be building authority for yourself and for your content. In addition, you should be getting some tasty linkjuice as a byproduct.
  5. Support your content. If something in the industry or discipline, update your content so it remains valuable. That insures that you don’t become irrelevant.

These are my suggestions. What are some other ways to come up with authoritative cornerstone content?

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Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Three Steps Of Successful Marketing

Someone recently asked me what I felt was the key to successful marketing. I told them that I believe the answer is three-fold:

  • First, have a product/service/brand that’s remarkable and compelling in and of itself. Seth Godin calls this making a purple cow.
  • Second, tell your brand’s and product’s story in such a way that your potential customers are as excited about your product as you are. If you’re not excited about your product, revisit step one.
  • Third, tell your story at places where your market is. This means not only building well-targeted SEO, PPC, and traditional offline campaigns, but crafting intelligent social media and viral campaigns to make sure that you’re involved where the conversations are happening in your market.

That said, if I had to distill the key to successful marketing into one word, it’d be passion. At the end of the day, If you don’t care about your product, how can you expect anyone else to?

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Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Lipstick on a Pig

The phrase “lipstick on a pig” generally means dressing up something unsexy, but despite the dressing, the thing remains unsexy.

A lot of people work in industries or sell products that could be considered unsexy. Are your marketing efforts doomed to be mundane and vanilla because you market something generally not considered to be sexy or cutting edge or cool? After all, maybe you make ugly green widgets. Or maybe you make ketchup.

Andy Sernovitz, speaking at the Buzz2009 conference, talked about how you could make marketing for even the most boring products interesting. He cited an example where Heinz Ketchup ran a campaign where people created their own ketchup commercials. All of a sudden, hundreads of thousands of people were watching videos about ketchup- not necessarily because ketchup was interesting but because the campaign was interesting. Ketchup merely piggybacked on a great idea.

Let’s look at another example: Apple vs. Dell. While you can quibble over the finer differences of the two brands, the bottom line is that they both make computers. Dell buyers are generally subdued about their new purchases, and they hardly say a word about their Dell after that (unless it breaks). On the other hand, Apple has somehow managed to convert their customers into disciples who harass every PC user around them to get them to switch. So what’s the difference? Apple has taken something mundane like your personal computer and shrouded it in the cloak of “cool.” They’ve put the lipstick of suspense, hyperbole and popular musicians at product launches; clever commercials; hip stores; and ultramodern product design on the unsexy pig of personal computers. And the funny thing is, to talk to any Mac user (myself included), that is one hot pig.

My point is this: it turns out that generally people like to be told what to think about your product. If you tell them your product is boring by creating typical or unoriginal advertising and marketing, that’s what they’re going to think. On the other hand, if you create the expectation that your product is cool by surrounding it by cool ideas and campaigns, be it Twitter or video contests (think this Klondike Bar contest), viral video campaigns (Will It Blend, anyone?) outrageous stunts (Ruby Tuesday) or any other  number of possible ideas, you’ll find that your product is more remarkable than you think. So get some lipstick on your pig and you just might be surprised at what’s under all that dirt.

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