How Simple Semantics Can Change the Way You Market
It’s no secret that the Internet has radically changed the way we shop, live, and think as a species. Over 60% of people will visit a company’s website before they ever set foot in a brick-and-mortar store location now! But, unfortunately, the old attitudes toward branding and marketing are still holding on—especially in the small business sector.
For some reason, small business owners still think that the only way they can promote their services is through TV and radio spots and maybe an ad or two in the local paper. While you are going to get results from those “tried and true” marketing methods, you could be getting so much more if you redefine what you consider marketing.
That’s the basic premise behind Jay Conrad Levinson’s Book Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business
In fact, if you take the primary assertion of the book—that
“ . . . marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world,”
and apply it to your business you can see just how much room for brand promotion and public persuasion you really have. Taking the thought one step further, Levinson goes on to assert that the majority of your marketing (especially for small businesses) doesn’t have to cost you much money at all!
There has been a great paradigm shift that places the emphasis of great content, relationship building, and personalization over traditional “interruption” marketing. While at its heart, this new style of marketing is a grass roots movement, the enormous success that many small companies were having with it led the big boys like Coca-Cola, Budweiser, and even Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign to embrace this new thinking.
So what’s the number one aspect of this new form of marketing? Having great content. You have no doubt heard that old cliché about leading a horse to water. That’s what old skool marketing is about. Throw your company’s name out there as far and wide as you can and you’ll skim a few leads or sales of the top of the billion viewers your ad gets. That’s extremely costly and incredibly wasteful. Think of it as leading billions of horses to water but only a few of them are even thristy.
On the other hand, by investing time rather than money in targeted campaigns and by giving away information and content that your prospects are interested in, you can get a much higher percentage of leads or sales. In terms of that old cliché, new marketing is like leading just a thousand horses to the watering hole but every single one of them is thirsty.
I recommend Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business
In order to keep your brand message as close as possible to what you had in mind when you originally created your company (back when it was just a daydream in the back of your mind) you should work directly with professional service providers—and cut out the middlemen—to build the public image of your brand.
Outsourcing is a great way for small businesses with limited budgets to do this very effectively but it’s a topic for another post. If you would like to know more, read “How Outsourcing Has Leveled the Playing Field.”
And if you liked this article or think you know somebody who could get some useful information out of it, pass it along!
