A good marketing expert has to capture and communicate the truth: what is at the heart of your brand? Who are you, why do you do what you do and why should anyone care?
So how does your business become a success? How do you use marketing to your benefit, while protecting your brand and making loads of moola?
Here are 4 tips on how to become better at marketing:
Carpet bomb London with 10,000 bananas
There's no point being the best at something and only letting your Mum know. And there's more weight behind showing you are the best, than shouting in peoples' faces I'M NUMBER ONE. If you sell the best bananas in the world, you can wait for the first person to buy one and eventually word of mouth will spread. By the end of week 1, you might be selling 10 bananas a day. OR, you can hire a plane, wear a Bananaman costume, and carpet bomb London with 10,000 free bananas attached to tiny parachutes that have your contact details on. By the end of that day, you'll be the number one banana distributor in the world - and it won't be you saying it, it will be everyone else.
More BLAM, less SPAM.
Nobody likes spam. Back when it was a food, it tasted horrible, ubiquitous and inescapable. And today when people receive spam emails, they get a horrible taste in their mouth, see spam everywhere and can't escape it. If you have an emailing list as a business, this list is gold dust, but it will soon crumble into complaints and thin air if you fail to be interesting to your audience. Never email the equivalent of your business taking a selfie with a load of money - think before you email. Send only emails that are going to interest your audience. Interesting articles on subjects they like. Link the articles back to your website. Drive traffic, and increase sales through being interesting.
Embrace the age of authentic marketing
This should really speak for itself - stop bullshitting. Stop lying. If you are selling a car, you can't say that it can fly and talk the language of cows...because you will soon be found out and your brand will be harmed. Focus on what you are selling, and if you can't think of something good to say about your product, then you need to improve your product. Never lie. Never exaggerate. Classmates.com told the world it would find your classmates, and sent emails to people telling them a lost friend was trying to get in touch. This was a lie. Classmates.com was sued for false advertising for almost $10million. When considering time has moved on since then and that we now live in the social media age, one lying advert and your business could die.
Test the chair before you tame the lion
You wouldn't become a lion tamer without testing a few different chairs out on a few different lions first. Likewise, in modern marketing everything can be tested...So there is no need to throw £100,000 behind a campaign and hope it works. You can show a select group various types of copy. You can run email tests and see what appeals to who and when. You can write articles to drive awareness, and measure what articles are the most popular. You can run campaigns on Twitter and Facebook, tweak the demographics and messaging and learn from your audience what they best respond to. You can do this for small amounts of money - figure out what you know is going to work, and then spend big.
To discuss content marketing and how it can help you and your business, email [email protected]