It is enormously satisfying to invest time reading for professional development and then stumble upon an extremely relevant tidbit of information.
These juicy “knowledge nuggets” are best served hot, which is why I’ve assembled a number of my favourites here. I hope you become as inspired as I have to innovate and refresh your marketing strategies!
“Number one in a small market is way more interesting, more fruitful and more fun than being number three in a larger market. When you’re the market leader, you set the agenda, you attract the leading customers and you are the one who gets targeted, picked on and singled out. The stakes are higher and so is your impact. The easiest way to become #1 is to redefine your focus and the way you serve your customers sufficiently that you redefine the market. Harley Davidson isn’t #1 in the market for motorcycles, but they are certainly #1 in the market for the kind of motorcycle that they sell. The other bikes may have two wheels, but they’re for different customers with different needs. Mass ennui is defeated by focused passion every time.”
– Seth Godin, bestselling author, blogger and marketing guru (www.sethgodin.com)
“Simplicity is about finding your core message and sharing it in a compact way. The core message is the single most important thing you have to communicate. The Army has a core message for its battle plans called ‘Commander’s Intent’. Smart companies like Southwest Airlines have core strategic messages, such as ‘THE low-fare airline’. Journalists use the ‘inverted pyramid’ model to write their stories, putting the most important information at the top of the article… [it] is about prioritization, and it’s also about saying a lot with a little. You can say a lot with a little by using analogies. Think about Hollywood high-concept pitches (Speed is ‘Die Hard on a bus’). Rather than teaching people ideas from scratch, you can tap into what they already know by using ‘schemas.'”
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (www.madetostick.com)
“Traditional marketing concentrates on ‘influentials’ whom people recognize as experts. These influentials are journalists, A-list bloggers, analysts, industry gurus, and consultants. The theory is that if your cause pleases them, they will influence the great unwashed masses to adopt it… Post-Internet, people have come to depend on the opinions of their friends and casual acquaintances as much as they do on experts, and this change has turned marketing upside down.”
– Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment and former chief evangelist of Apple (www.guykawasaki.com)
“By understanding that economizing does not mean saving money, but investing it wisely, guerrilla [marketers] test their investments on a small scale before plunging headlong into any kind of marketing. They have no fear of failure, providing the failures are small ones and knowing that even one success in ten tries means discovering a path to wealth and profitability… Of all the methods of wasting money and not economizing, the number
one leader in marketing is failure to commit to a plan. Untold millions have been invested in marketing campaigns that had everything right about them except commitment on the part of the marketer. Guerrillas know that it takes time for an investment to pay off and instant results are rarely part of the deal.”
– Jay Conrad Levinson, author (and Father) of Guerilla Marketing (www.gmarketing.com)
“We see lots of advantages of email campaigns and trackability, but when we look at how consumers think about email, they’re only really interested in getting email from people that they trust and that they know. Increasingly, of course, we have lots of mechanisms for cutting out a lot of this information overload – a lot of filters, either manual or automatic, to cut out the spam and commercial messaging. So getting and retaining contact with your customers is about ensuring they trust you enough in order for you to be on their white list of incoming email.”
– Jonathan Reynolds, Academic Director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management from Oxford University iTunes U Podcast – Marketing: Creating and Keeping Customers
“I never miss an opportunity to market my creations. Success or failure isn’t always determined by the quality of what you produce or provide; it is also a function of public awareness that your product or service is out there and available for purchase.”
– Steven Schussler, author of It’s a Jungle in There and Founder of the Rainforest Café (www.schusslercreative.com)
“Word of mouth isn’t a campaign, it’s a result of a great one. (Or one gone horribly wrong)”
– Twitter, Scott Stratten, author of Unmarketing @unmarketing (www.unmarketing.com)
“I realize that I may offend some of my peers with my sarcastic subhead, but I simply must tell you that your ‘Happy! Fluffy! Be all you can be! Live your best life!’ marketing copy is really irritating. It is as if you had toilet paper hanging out of the back of your pants after leaving a public restroom. It would be irresponsible for me not to mention it… people do not respond to generic brand names that cause no emotional reaction. Your job is to reach out and sock your people in the gut with clear, direct language that speaks directly to them.”
– Pamela Slim, author of Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur (www.escapefromcubiclenation.com)
“Content can come in various shapes and forms. It can be blogs, e-books, white papers, video and photos. We at HubSpot, for example, produce tons of content, and that’s the value we offer for visitors to convert them into leads. That’s how we keep their interest in our resources and, ultimately, in our product.
But many marketers are actually afraid of the workload associated with content production. Yet this doesn’t have to be the tack of one person in your organization. Think about ways in which you can crowdsource content and then re-package it. For instance, a podcast can be a series of blog posts, which can eventually become an e-book, and that’s something we are planning on doing.”
– The Inbound Marketing Experts at Hubspot – From Prospect to Evangelist – Optimizing Relationships with Social Media (www.hubspot.com)
“As a service boutique business, you have to pay even MORE attention to the intangibles because your clients aren’t going home with a pretty packaged product. Take a dry cleaner for example. When you walk in, if you notice dirty carpet, nasty stickers on the windows and Post-it® notes lying everywhere, WHY would you think that they are getting your clothes clean? Your clients are buying your service so the experience they receive is all they take home. We are all judging your service business by the intangibles so make sure it’s unbelievable!”
– Sarah Petty and Erin Verbeck, authors of The Boutique Experience: a business model, not a gift shop and Founders of The Joy of Marketing (www.thejoyofmarketing.com)