How to: marketing in 2008

When you go on a date with someone, you usually don’t ask them to marry you at the end of the night, right? The same is true of marketing. Sounds obvious but so often marketing tries to move too fast too soon. You really need to build a relationship with your audience first, because people buy from people (or companies) they trust!

So how can you do this? While it still has a place in your marketing mix, buying ads is not the answer anymore. People have more choice and less time to listen to what you have to say than ever before…and you want them to pay attention to your advertisement?

I think the steps you need to take are as follows:

1. Figure out if your product/service is remarkable or not (tip: anyone at your company including your CEO is not a judge of this). If it isn’t, maybe you can do a better job communicating its value?
2. Find someone in your company with the passion, knowledge & experience to start developing viral content. Start a blog, podcast series, ebooks…start casting some viral linkbait lures. Eventually you will catch a big one.
3. Over time and with good content you will start to develop an audience that trusts what you have to say. Next time they are in the market for whatever it is you sell, guess who’s going to be on the shortlist?
4. Stop measuring leads (aka the phonebook) as success metrics. Focus on stats that show your users are responding to your efforts (i.e increases in web traffic, inbound inquiries, mentions on social media etc…

Start by doing experiments to prove the success to upper management. Once you show it works, you’ll get support to do it on a larger scale. Good luck!