Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.
It is easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.
Penguin Magic – it’s not the Amazon of magic tricks (because being the Amazon of everything is difficult indeed).
– every trick for sale of the site is demonstrated with a video
– continue to invest and build connections with their community.
“People like us do things like this” is how each of us understands culture, and marketers engage with this idea every day.
You cannot possibly change everyone; therefore asking “who’s it for?” can focus your actions.
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want to feel safe and respected.”
They want the way it will make them feel.
Humans are lonely, and they want to be seen and known. People want to be part of something. It’s safer that way, and often more fun.
Market-driven – to hear the market, listen to it. Think about the hopes and dreams of customers and their friends.
Marketing-driven – the latest Facebook data hacks.
Being market driven lasts.
Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members.
A marketer is curious about other people. She wonders about what others are struggling with, what makes them tick. She’s fascinated by their dreams and their beliefs.
People aren’t eager to pay you with their attention. The fact that you bought an ad doesn’t earn you something that priceless. Trade it for something they need or want.
If we merely try to fill a hole in the market, we’re doomed to a cycle of rearview-mirror behaviour. Always wary of our competitors. We have no choice but to be driven by scarcity. focused on maintaining or perhaps slightly increasing our market share.
The alternative is to find and build and earn your story, the arc of the change your seek to produce. This is a generative posture, one based on possibility not scarcity.
Now you’ve chosen your audience, where do you want to take them?
People confuse wants and needs:
need – air, water, health, roof.
want – people are aware of their wants, but terrible at inventing new ways to address those wants.
Begin with dreams and fears, emotional states, and with the change your customers seek.
People want something because of how it will make them feel. That’s what they are buying a feeling.
Just as no one needs a drill bit (they want a hole), no one needs a real estate broker. What they need and want is how it makes them feel to get what a broker can get them.
Find the people worth serving, and then find a change worth making.
Every very good customer gets you another one.
Your best customers become your new sales people.
You need to build something that works better when it gets spread.
“I made something that I like, that I thought you’d like. How’d I do? What advice do you have for how I could make it fit your worldview more closely?”
Marketeers create tension, and forward motion that relieves that tension
– Questions
– Create tension, the relieve it
Busy people (the kind of people you seek to change) don’t care about your work as much as you do. They’re not as up to date as you are, or as aware of the competitive landscape or drama behind the scenes.
We scan instead of study
What a Professional does for you is design something that other people will like. They create a look and feel that reminds people of their sort of magic.
Nigerian spam copy is so bad – it filters out people who won’t fall for their con. Better to filter them out at the start, than invest time and fail at the end. They want people stupid/lazy enough not to spot the typo’s and believe in the scam.
The best marketeers earn enrolment by seeking people who want the change being offered.
Direct Marketing
Facebook ads, Google ads – anything you measure
Brand Marketing
Billboard signs etc
Issue is when people try to do brand marketing on direct channels such as Facebook.
Direct Marketing = Action Marketing.
Always directly market on these, measure, track, add to funnel.
Free?
1, Free ideas that spread – education
2, Expensive expressions of those ideas that are worth paying for – tool
Lowering your price doesn’t make you more trusted. It does the opposite.
Trust is as scarce as Attention
The best way to earn trust is through action.
We remember what you did a long time after we forget what you said.
Invest in the Lifetime Value of your customers. Building new things for your customers instead of racing around trying to find new customers for your things.
Why will people tell them about your thing?
– give them a why. A reason for sharing.
Story of self – scratch own itch
Story of us – we all find it useful
Story of now – here’s a free trial
Just like every powerful tool, the impact comes from the craftsman, not the tool.
Realize that as a marketer, the better you are trying to teach or sell to the right person is worth far more than what you are charging.