Ok so you want to up your marketing game and you are looking for recommendations where to start.
Here is the first post of a serie where I share with you what I think are the best references and guiding principles in marketing.
This is stuff I have collected, read and applied over the course of more than 10 years and I will probably keep updating it as time pass.
The fact that it took me 10 years to collect and deploy this knowledge doesn’t mean it will take you the same amount of time, but it sure should give you the feel that it is no quick n dirty fix either. So if you are here to get the 5 steps to get rich, you might be a little disappointed.
Markets are conversations.
This understanding – together with an 94 other points described in the Cluetrain Manifesto is the foundation of proper marketing.
Markets are conversations. Conversations who lead to exchanges of opinions, goods and services. Conversations happening in one-to-one face-to-face in person meeting, or happening in conferences, open-doors events, or through telemarketing campaigns, of social-media conversations, blogs, youtube videos.
The more people you include in the conversation, the more exposure you get, so the more chances to sell you get.
The more you also get chances to learn where you went wrong and how you can improve.
Why does it matter?
Because as much as this might sound obvious, a tendency for short term vision fuelled by a lack of patience drive people to ignore the conversation and turn quickly their marketing effort into bad advertising or worse sort of spams, fooling themselves that this is kinda of helping anybody.
This kind of behaviours by the way is what give bad rap to marketing.
That’s also why 90% of people trust recommendations by friends and less than 15% trust ads.
Don’t ask me where I got these numbers I don’t remember, but I am sure you can google that yourself and even without Google, you can agree with me that it makes sense.
Some marketing campaigns are so bad it looks like starting a tinder conversation by asking to send nudes.
So, do me a favour and read the Cluetrain manifesto, you won’t regret it.
If you’re in a hurry, here is a 4 min video is doing a nice job at summarizing the concepts – it contains a few wild approximations, but hey, we can’t be too harsh when you have that short amount of time to information ratio.
In the next posts in this series, I’ll probably cover a few other key principles and then we’ll move to funnel design and more technical aspects of marketing and campaigns.