Marketing is the process of creating a market. Most people think you do that by selling. You don’t. You do it by serving.
Great marketing enhances your status, creates FOMO, educates or entertains, is worth paying for, and sells without selling.
I abide by these seven hard truths about marketing:
1. No one cares about you.
People only care about themselves and what you can do for them.
If you’re additive to their life, they’ll stay. But the moment you stop being valuable, attention will dissolve.
2. Good marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.
It makes the sale for you without pestering or pushing. It inherently proves why you’re the obvious choice.
Insertion of CTAs within content is now against best practice. It invalidates the entire post.
If you’re unignorable, people will self-select to visit the link-in-bio. Otherwise, don’t push CTAs.
3. Becoming a media company is mandatory.
Good marketing feels like a bingeable show.
Serialized content done well is the biggest opportunity for any business. It keeps audiences coming back with built-in incentive to do so.
So, you need a dedicated media property where you can run programming akin to a movie studio.
We’re also in a silent race to “scale free.” Audiences will go wherever they can get the best content for the lowest cost.
Whoever democratizes access to the best content in their niche will get the lion’s share of attention.
4. People trust personal brands, not companies.
Companies need evangelists. These “internal influencers” act more as brand stewards than employees.
This could be a C-suite leader you hire who does consistent speaking gigs, has a book, and a decently large 30K follower base on LinkedIn.
But it could also be an independent influencer with 100K-followed newsletter and YouTube who you pay to promote your stuff.
In either case, they are paid more for who they reach, not so much for what they do… and how far they reach.
5. Marketing has to drive revenue… or it will get nixxed.
Marketing – both personnel and programs – must affect business economics in at least one of four ways: driving sales, increasing lifetime value, inspiring repeat purchases, or reducing churn.
If it doesn’t do those things, it’ll get canceled.
The way you drive revenue is by giving away all the steps and secrets for success which sets the stage to sell implementation on the back end.
6. Followers, follower quality, and reach are the new gold.
We live in a clout culture. A million social media followers are not worth a million bucks. They’re worth $10 million or more.
The value of a follower is not the same across channels. Some followers on certain channels are more valuable than others.
A Twitter follower is considerably less valuable than a newsletter subscriber, for example. So you should optimize for building your subscribership in the most valuable spaces.
Generally, these are space where you own the “land” (not some third party).
I wrote about this in my book.
7. The person with the best content, not price or product, wins.
Content-as-a-product is the business model of the 2020s and 2030s.
Within your content, you have to find the “voice of the customer” to speak in a way that will feel native to your followers.
The one who can best articulate the thoughts running on repeat in their audience’s mind wins the business.
The content you make to lead to your product is now as important as your product.
Stop doing marketing that is not wanted. If your customers wouldn’t come asking where it went if you suddenly stopped doing it, stop doing it.