101 Inspiring Marketing Quotes (for Creativity in Your Campaigns)

I know I need a kick in the butt sometimes.

When I can’t read a book or attend a conference, I like to peruse inspiring quotes for a quick boost…

And so I thought, perhaps I might share a bunch of those quotes to get your creativity pumping and your brain ready for incredible marketing.

If you haven’t checked them out – also check out ‘101 Inspirational Sales Quotes (to Help You Stay Motivated.)’ 

Without further ado, here are your inspirational marketing quotes!

1. “The key is, no matter what story you tell, make your buyer the hero.” – Chris Brogan
2. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter F. Drucker
3. “Content is King but engagement is Queen, and the lady rules the house!” – Mari Smith
4. “Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time.” – Ann Handley
5. “Don’t settle: Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it.” – Chris Brogan
6. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” – Tom Fishburne
7. “Quality is the best business plan, period.”—John Lasseter
8. “Good content marketing makes a person stop, read, think, and behave differently.”—Joe Pulizzi
9. “Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed.”—Dan Zarrella
10. “Success is making those who believed in you look brilliant.”—Dharmesh Shah
11. “You don’t build a business, you build people, and then people build the business.”—Zig Ziglar
12. “We drink the can, not the beverage.”—Seth Godin
13. “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”—Jeff Bezos
14. “There is no more B2B or B2C: It’s H2H, Human to Human.”—Bryan Kramer
15. “Content is fire, social media is gasoline.”—Jay Baer
16. “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does.”—Steuart
17. “Leverage the strength that you have: that no one else can be you.” – Todd Wheatland
18. “Not viewing your email marketing as content is a mistake.” – Chris Baggott
19. “Marketing is really just about sharing your passion.” – Michael Hyatt
20. “As social media grows and matures, showing a return becomes critical.” – Heidi Cohen
21. “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin
22. “You can’t push your sales messages on your fans too often.” – Andrea Vahl
23. “I know that half my ad dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half.” – John Wanamaker
24. “Make the prospect a more informed buyer with content.” – Robert Simon
25. “The aim of marketing is to get and keep a customer.” – Peter Drucker
26. “Too often, feeling intimidated becomes our excuse not to be awesome.” – Scott Stratten
27. “Successful companies in social media function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners than as traditional advertisers.” - Erik Qualman
28. “Content marketing is all the marketing that’s left.” –  Seth Godin
29. “Content marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.” – Jon Buscall
30. “The key ingredient to a better content experience is relevance.” –  Jason Miller
31. “Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.” – Jonah Sachs
32. “Marketing goes wrong when it is perceived by companies as a bolt-on activity.” – Michael Perry
33. “Marketing should be thought of as a filter, not a magnet.” – Doug Kessler
34. “Most of us have experienced wow moments. We just haven’t taken time to think deeply about them.” – Michael Hyatt
35. “Just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean that you should.” – W. Edward Deming
36. “Make it simple, but significant.” – Don Draper
37. “You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.” – Beth Comstock
38. “People share, read and generally engage more with any type of content when it’s surfaced through friends and people they know and trust.” – Malorie Lucich
39. We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in. – Craig Davis
40. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”—Bill Gates
41. “Never write an Advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by.”—David Ogilvy
42. “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations stories and magic”—Seth Godin
43. “Think like a customer.”—Paul Gillin
44. “Everyone is not your customer”—Seth Godin
45. “The man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time”—Henry Ford
46. “The best marketing of all is happy clients”—Susan Stripling
47. “People don’t care about your business. They care about their problems. Be the solution that they’re looking for.”—Melonie Dodaro
48. “That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.”—Jeff Bezos
49. “The best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy.” – Rand Fishkin
50. “Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.” – Joe Chernov
51. “If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.” - Guy Kawasaki
52. “As marketers, we should be changing the mantra from ‘always be closing’ to ‘always be helping’.” – Jonathan Lister
53. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” – Tom Fishburne
54. “Increasingly, the mass marketing is turning into a mass of niches.” – Chris Anderson
55. “Too many marketers cobble together marketing tactics because of shiny object syndrome, chasing competitors, or simply acting on intuition. If data about your buyers reveals their preference to use search for top of funnel discovery and then forums to flush out solution ideas, then it makes sense to use SEO and social media to be where your customers are. If they like white papers, create them. If they prefer events, then host them.” – Lee Odden
56. “Never lose sight of the fact that all SEO ranking signals revolve around content of some kind.” – Duane Forrester
57. “Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.” – Philip Kotler
58. “If you’re not meeting your visitors’ needs, it doesn’t matter how ‘optimized’ your site is.” – Stoney deGeyter
59. “Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealized, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence, their brands acquire no texture, no character and no public trust.” –Richard Branson, Founder of The Virgin Group
60. “Today it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ – it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic.” – Adam Audette
61. “Optimize for what would happen IF you ranked, do not optimize to rank.”– Will Critchlow
62. “If you’re a good marketing person, you have to be a little crazy.” – Jim Metcalf
63. “A Marketer who can’t market himself is not a Marketer.” – Dev Chandan
64. “Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it.” – Jay Baer
65. “Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.” – Joe Chernov
66. “SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.” – Duane Forrester
67. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” –Maya Angelou, Poet
68. “Search marketing, and most Internet marketing in fact, can be very threatening because there are no rules. There’s no safe haven. To do it right, you need to be willing to be wrong. But search marketing done right is all about being wrong. Experimentation is the only way.” – Mike Moran
69. “Don’t make excuses, make improvements.” – Neil Patel
70. “Less is more. Keeping it simple takes time and effort.” –Jeff Bullas
71. “A lot of marketers are under the assumption that simply creating more content than the competition will get them the results they want. I beg to differ. If Google algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin have shown us anything, it’s that quality trumps everything else.” – Neil Patel
72. “The only way to win at content marketing is for the reader to say, ‘This was written specifically for me.” – Jamie Turner
73. “Great marketers have immense empathy for their audience. They can put themselves in their shoes, live their lives, feel what they feel, go where they go, and respond how they’d respond. That empathy comes out in content that resonates with your audience.” – Rand Fishkin
74. In advertising, not to be different is virtually suicidal.” – Bill Bernbach
75. “Never let ads write checks your website can’t cash.” – Avinash Kaushik
76. “If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to that brand.” –Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks
77. “Try to say everything in an ad and you end up saying nothing.” – Jeff Mamula
78. “Women tend to make 85 percent of household health care decisions. Facebook is where they make them.” – Angie Teates
79. “Don’t deliver a product, deliver an experience.” –Chelsea Krost
80. “Nobody cares about your products, except you. Create interesting content!” – David Meerman Scott
81. “Behind every piece of great content is a marketer, publisher, author who passionately and empathetically sought to help his or her audience. But how do you teach empathy to an executive who has none? The answer is fear. You have to show them that if you don’t create the best answer to your customers’ questions, someone else will.” – Michael Brenner
82. “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is—it is what consumers tell each other it is.” –Scott Cook, Co-Founder of Intuit
83. “If your content isn’t driving conversation, you’re doing it wrong.” –Dan Roth
84. “It’s hard to target a message to a generic 35-year-old middle-class working mother of two. It’s much easier to target a message to Jennifer, who has two children under four, works as a paralegal, and is always looking for quick but healthy dinners and ways to spend more time with her kids and less time on housework.” –Elizabeth Gardner, Founder of Garnish Media
85. “Behind every piece of bad content is an executive who asked for it.” – Michael Brenner
86. “Our job is not to create content. Our job is to change the world of the people who consume it.” – Andrea Fryrear
87. “Actually talk to your customers. Use the language that they use. Talk about the things they talk about. Never feed salad to a lion.” – Jay Acunzo
88. “The reason we struggle with content marketing is because we haven’t started with ‘Why?’ Customers don’t care about your vanity metrics. Ask them, ‘How can I help?’” – Kristina Halvorson
89. “We need to create a business strategy for our content. That means saying no to many channels and content types, and focus on where we can build an asset, an audience, over time.” – Joe Pulizzi
90. “If your website was a city, there would be a highway of visitors flowing through it. But if you don’t know where that highway is, you don’t know how to guide traffic. You don’t know where to put the billboards.” – Andy Crestodina
91. “The size of the idea is so much more important than the size of the budget.” – Jonathan Mildenhall, Former CMO, Airbnb
92. “In a sea of mediocre content, a brave tone can be a big differentiator.” – Ann Handley
93. “We all want quick fixes and wins. That’s human but short sighted. Successful content marketing demands a long game mindset. Keeping fit and training requires persistence. Building a big brand is a journey. So keep going as there is no other way. Content marketing demands persistence.” – Jeff Bullas
94. “Organic content isn’t dead. You can’t build a community and maintain relationships in a paid way.” – Jaime Schember, Product Marketing Manager – Social Media, Google
95. “The brands that execute influencer marketing the best are the ones that find influencers that perfectly align with their brand story. They’re able to create content that does not stray from the influencer’s normal content style. And most of all, the content they create still prioritizes the influencer’s voice above the brand’s.” – Nicholas Cole
96. “Influencer marketing is one of the the most undervalued forms of marketing, in part because many people still don’t realize they are being sold to. Marketers pay lip service to the power of storytelling, but it is very, very, VERY real. The ability to tell a story on social media means everything to your brand or business. A great story can sell a product much faster than any data point can.” – Brittany Hoffman
97. “An influencer promoting and amplifying your message, your brand, to their audience means credibility. It means additional reach, and it means you get an outsized modifier to the conversion process.” – Rand Fishkin
98. “If you can take your personality and inject it into the message you share, you’ll be one step ahead in the content marketing game.” – Jason Miller
99. “Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” –Wendy Piersall
100. “Be passionate about your company’s culture and your mission. Remain positive because it inspires others.” –Kurt Uhlir
101. “More content is not better. What’s the worst case scenario if we slow ourselves down and do some analysis?” – Kristina Halvorson