Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Your Product is Your Marketing

Product and marketing

Your Product is your best form of Marketing.

Have you played the telephone game? You know the one where one person whispers a sentence and by the end it gets all garbled? Well I’m at the end of this chain except with the advent of copy and paste the message is no longer lost. I found the below quote from Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon) on Mitch Joels blog (who found it on another blog… who found it somewhere else). The bottom line is the quote is accurate…

“Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.”

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Why You Should Make Sure Others Steal Your Ideas

steal ideasYou should strive to have your ideas stolen.

Over the last few days a few of my friends on Facebook have spoken out about how their ideas or strategies have been adopted (stolen). Now these are ideas/strategies they haven’t readily shared but other marketers did what all market participants do, they watch their market and adapted.

While this might seem like a problem to some it’s actually what you should strive for.

If you notice your ideas are starting to get picked up it shows you’re having an impact on the market. It should also cause you some level of discomfort but not for the reason you might think.

This should be an early warning that your idea or strategy is about to lose effectiveness. The more saturated an idea or concept becomes typically the harder it is to stand out and grab the attention of your market. read more →

 

8 Universal Motivations

Whenever I sit down to write sales copy, create a sales script, or figure out how to reach a target market I start with the basics. In essence I try to imagine a single person in the target market and what their thoughts and concerns are… I then use the 8 universal motivations found below to spur specific ideas and insight.

These ultimate motivations are what people “really” want. Your product or service is the vehicle that will help them achieve one or some of these deep held motivations. They important part is to align your messaging with as many of these motivations as you can, while still staying true to the ultimate benefit your product or service provides.

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Top Marketing and Advertising Books

If you read every book on this list we believe you would have a base understanding on the art and science of marketing. Sure there is about 100 or so more we could add but we focused on books that give a good round foundation of marketing. You’ll notice on this list there isn’t many (if any at all) books on the social landscape. It’s our belief that the social landscape is just a new tool that employs the tips, tactics, and wisdom you will learn in the books we feature here. read more →

 

What Obscene, Outrageous Visions Are You Giving Your Market? And Why It Matters

Your memory is highly attuned to visual images — knowing how this visualization works will ensure you can put it into practice in your daily activities.

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer is a book I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s a few years old and if you haven’t read it yet, I’d suggest it. It’s about memory and the author’s journey to understanding memory and ultimately competing in both the U.S and International Memory Championships (yeah, they’ve got those).

Now, if you’ve read the book or done any training on memory, then you know one of the techniques involves what are called “memory palaces.” I’ll explain it a little because it plays into understanding our visual memory connection. read more →

 

How to Use Priming in Social Media

Priming Areas of the brain

Priming is a psychological term that essentially explains how an earlier stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. For instance, if I give you a list of words and I include the word ‘table’ and later ask you to complete a word starting with ‘tab’, the probability that you will answer table is higher than if you weren’t primed.

For years priming has been the study of modern media such as television and video games. Maybe you’ve heard of how we are priming people to act out violently based on violence across all forms of entertainment. The media has really pushed that exposure to “media violence” can prime subsequent aggressive behaviors, cognition’s, or perceptions. Politics of course picked it up and started using ‘priming effects’ for moral and ethical issues.

I believe priming is one of the most powerful factors of positioning and connecting in social media. Understanding the elements of priming can make you a more effective communicator and increase your effectiveness in social media.

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28 Insights on Business and Marketing

I’ve been a consultant or owned a business for almost over 12 years. When you’ve been in business or worked with as many business owners/entrepreneurs as I have you start to see trends. I thought I’d try to capture some thoughts I’ve learned so far in this journey. What follows has no order or sequence it’s just general truisms I’ve discovered working with some amazing people throughout the years…

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Social Media Kills Brain Cells [mock study]

Okay, first I’ve been studying social media. Well not formally and not with in the triple blind and an army of PHD’s or lab rats kind of way. But rest assured I’ve been studying what it does to businesses and professionals.

My study has concluded that it kills brain cells–and that’s a bad thing. I thought I heard a few years ago that brain cells grow back but I wasn’t able to find any search results that helped:

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It's All About You

The number one rule any marketer or business owner can realize when they have a product or service is that in the end we really just care about ourselves. Even if someone chooses to give their life in support of a cause ultimately we are motivated by selfish altruism. This is slightly misleading because it doesn’t deal with the acts of charity, ethics, and why we all don’t just go around killing each other. But in the end we do nice things to really get what we want.

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How Customers Make Decisions – The Purchase Cycle Explained

Today we talk about the purchase cycle and decision points that your customer goes through in the digital age. I’ve put together a mindmap of the purchase cycle that will help visualize what we cover in the show. What started me down this path was a great post by Paul Burani at SearchEngineWatch.com on Comparison Shopping and the Pursuit of Trust. He had a great graphic on this post but I wanted to expand on it a bit.

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