We believe that business is about two things, and only two things matter to your business.
Number one is marketing, number two is innovation. Furthermore, everything other than marketing and innovation is a cost—it’s an expense, it’s overhead. Marketing and innovation is where all the profit comes from. What are these two things? Innovation is creating new things that people want and marketing is connecting with those people
If you want to survive in business you need cutting edge marketing strategies to help your business reach a mass audience. 99% of marketing companies do not use the best marketing strategies to help a business grow fast. So the question we have for you and the question that we ask ourselves a lot is: why does most marketing suck? Why is it that most marketing just plain sucks?
If you look at a billboard, if you open up a website, if you search the internet, most of the marketing that you see, it’s not just okay, it’s not bad, it sucks. It’s horrible. It’s poor— it’s like throwing money down a rat-hole. We all know that this type of marketing was not created by people who didn’t care about the marketing. Most of it was created either by caring business owners who were doing their best job trying to communicate, or by professional marketing firms who are paid to do this, who’ve been doing this for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. So why is it that most of it sucks?
The best products and services don’t really need to be sold to people, because the best products and services are solutions to problems or results all in themselves. So, what are people buying when they’re buying your product or service? Are they actually buying the product or service? No. They’re buying an outcome. They’re buying a result. They’re buying the delivery or escape from some pain or anxiety that they’re feeling. The product or service is a means to an end that they’re seeking.
A fundamental mistake that most business people make when marketing and selling their products is they try to talk people into wanting their product instead of saying, “I understand the outcome you’re trying to achieve, I understand your fear of frustration, your pain…”
When you have a fast growing business, (start-up) it is critical that you understand that for you, marketing is not the same as it is for a big, multi-national fortune 500 company. They are two completely different games. What works for them not only probably won’t work for you, but it will probably cost you a lot of money that you could’ve used in much better ways. So the strategy that these big companies use might roughly be described as trying to get their name out there.
Dean Jackson has this great metaphor, he says,” It’s not about getting your name out there, it’s about getting their name in here.” So for you if you have a small unknown brand or high-growth start-up, let’s try to figure out how to get their names in here instead of your name out there, because we don’t want to stand on a mountain top and yell the name of your business and hopefully drum up a billion dollars to spend branding our logo like companies like Nike (which has spent a billion dollars branding their logo…) I don’t know about you, but we don’t have an extra billion dollars around to drive a little shape and a name into the minds of my prospects, We need to do something a little bit more street-smart, a little bit more result-oriented.
So, to us, the kind of marketing that we’re going to do is about getting their name in here. It’s finding your audience, finding your market, understanding their needs and then communicating clearly that your product or service, the thing that you offer will deliver them to the promised land, will help them get the results, the outcome, the delivery from the fear, the anxiety, the pain that they seek at a fair price; and you’ll make an offer to do it. You might want to cut and paste this for your twitter account. Marketing is about conversion, not communication. Marketing is about conversion, not about communication. You’re not trying to communicate with people, you’re trying to get them to come in and convert and give you money in exchange for what it is that you’re trying to sell.