What is marketing? Is it a form of advertising? Is traditional
marketing dead?
Marketing according to Wikipedia is the communication
between a company and the consumer audience. The purpose is to induce behavioral
change in the audience.
Markets are the people who buy what you are selling. Marketing
is the research and studies conducted on the audience preferences and advertising
is the process of making your product or service known to your market.
Businesses have up words to 100 different market approach’s
such as; cloud marketing, email marketing, alliance marketing, call to action
marketing, push marketing, pull marketing and so on. I want to cover 3 elements
I find relevant in most cases; Organic, paid, social.
Organic is something that is spread through word of mouth, shareable,
likeable, and reachable. Paid is something that a third party/broker receives monetary
compensation for reaching an audience. Social is something that you barter
besides money to reach an audience.
Just as I thought traditional marketing is dead I was put in
check when I met Riley from Chicago.
“What do your
potential clients pay attention to? That’s where you should be advertising.”
Paying attention to detail is something that is over looked
in the business world. When you think it is important to fret about product
place and price you become narrow sighted and you forget the most important factor,
that is; people.
People buy from you. People are your market. People share if
they like what you are offering them. People barter to have your
product/service.
The attention needs to be refocused on people, not on ‘sell product,
make money.”
I made several mistakes when I entered the market space with
my company.
First and foremost, I experienced every avenue of advertising;
mail, door to door, radio, news paper, and even carrier pigeons. That last part
was to see if your paying attention, and also to emphasize that I exhausted what
I thought was all the resources available.
What was over looked here is not so much where I was
advertising but how I was doing it, and most importantly why I was doing it. I
understood my target audience, I wasn’t clear about my objective. This created
chaos and loss of money.
The focus was on profit rather than turnover. I need you to
pay attention to what I am going to say. Profit is a bi-product of the
relationships you build with customers.
While exhausting the many options that I briefly explained
above, my initial intentions were to ‘get the foot in the door’. While acquiring
clients was my main concern, my actions were depicting a different message all
together.
Make profit.
Despite the conventional view that the business has to make
as much money as possible in as short amount of time as possible, this is contradictory
to how business becomes dominant in the market.
Take Tesla Motors for example; Elon Musk wanted to
revolutionize the way we live our lives by deploying environmentally safe
vehicles. Production costs were higher than the actual value of the vehicles
that were being sold.
Why did he choose to go into deficit? Because when you bring
people value they become loyal to your brand. This is why finding used Tesla
vehicles is not that simple.
How do you bring people value?
You do so by connecting and building relationships with them,
becoming interested in what they are interested in.
Christopher Locke explains it best in his intuitive book
Gonzo Marketing; “What drives common
interest is interest not product.”
Sounds tedious and extensive reaching every client and getting
involved in their lives. That’s how most disruptive businesses become well,
disruptive.
Riley works for an advertising agency. We met in Arizona this
weekend and he has unlocked my perspective on traditional marketing. I became parochial
about the traditional advertising approach that I deployed in my early days in
the company because it didn’t seem to work.
I came to the realization when I was talking to
Riley thatCome finish the rest over here, it's free karasingroup.com
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