21 things marketers should know

By the time you will turn 65 you will have watched 2 million TV Ads and 1.105.000 new products will have hit your local grocery store. To be relevant your message has to evoke awareness, be short, relevant and appeal to a concept your prospect already knows and cares about. Otherwise you wasted your and their time whilst filling the world with more useless junk for a lot of money as marketing campaigns do not come cheap. May these 21 tips out of 5 books help in your endeavors.

1. Build relationships in three steps: Awareness, familiarity, trust

Start with getting awareness of your potential clients and learn more about them by asking questions early to follow up with familiar information to the prospect over time. In the long run this will build trust. This inevitably will lead to the prospect following your advice which will lead to sales or any other outcome you want to achieve through your influence.

2. Think share of customer instead of share of market

Markets do not buy products, people do. Understanding and influencing people takes a lot of time and resources. Rather than developing a marketing plan to enter a market, develop a plan to enter the mind of your target group. Once there maximize the share of the wallet of this target group by solving more and more of their daily tasks and saving them time to do what they actually want to do. Apple and Procter and Gamble are prime examples of this approach. One for yuppies, the other for stay at home mothers.

3. Produce long term, interactive campaigns

The messages you will remember best are those which you heard repeatedly and interacted with the most. Think about how babies learn to talk. You do not show them your face and name on a billboard from afar for one time and expect them to call you "Mom" or "Dad" directly afterwards.

4. Interruption marketing is the enemy of everyone who tries to save time

If you interrupt someone and waste their time you become their enemy. You do not even accept gifts from your enemies, as they might be poisoned. Get permission first by being helpful for the right people, at the right time, with the right message or solution. Do not fool yourself permission is not transferable (from product a to b or company a to b), selfish, takes time and can be taken away at any point. It does not grow on trees and has to be nurtured just like one.

5. Stealing is cheaper than inventing

Steve Jobs stole ideas from Wozniak (Apple 1 + 2) and Xerox (Mac) and claimed they were his. Larry Ellison stole the idea of a relational database from IBM and was quicker to bring it to market to turn it into a multi-million dollar business (Oracle). The list goes on with Edison stealing from Tesla, Newton stealing from Leibnitz (maybe coincidental parallel inventing, but i personally do not believe in such randomness) and other famous inventors. Even though it might not go down well with your glass of ethical principles those who steal from people who are either to slow, ignorant or nice (mixture of the three will do nice either) to capitalize their ideas will have a low invest, high yield strategy at their hands. A marketer should know this to protect himself or join the dark side of marketing. Your choice.

6. Disruption creates markets

Apple was able to disrupt the personal computer market by introducing the GUI (which was stolen from Xerox), the music industry by introducing in built storage and simple navigation and the cellphone market by introducing intuitive navigation and merging phones with cameras. How much advertising has been done for these products ? Exceptionally less than others to achieve similar effects on revenue and profit where there was no new market created or less focus in the marketing strategies. In fact, i would highly doubt you could create a more massive effect than to disrupt a market. Look around you in your daily commute for proof.

7. Create disruption by combining old ideas into new ones

The products and concepts apple used to disrupt the existing markets were not new inventions from top to bottom. They were smart combinations of technologies and ideas already available to simplify the user experience in already massive, profitable markets.

8. Obsession with detail can lead to massive failures

The product Steve Jobs designed with the most leeway for his own ego and obsession for detail was also his biggest failure. Next was the company which he founded after who was eased out of apple. Some of the apple employees who were most devoted to him joined. It was a spectacular flop in terms of sales and profit generated as it was overpriced and late to market due to the obsession to detail. However it earned itself a place in the national museum of art for its revolutionary and thought provoking design. Again your choice.

9. Practice "you" marketing

Your prospects could not care less about you, your company or your product. They only care for themselves, therefore make sure that your marketing addresses "What is in it for my customer". Use phrases like "You will be the most beautiful mom in town", "You will become more successful", "you will be admired" rather than "The tech 33770 is the best of its kind when it comes to dust prevention in narrow surroundings", so what...

10. Practice persistent follow up

Most sales people and marketers give up after contacting their prospects once or twice. Remember not to be disruptive but follow up again & again & again until the the conditions of right time, right recipient, right message are met. The ones who stop trying will be beat by the ones who stay in the game.

11. Practice minimedia marketing

Get out those business cards and postcards. Talk to the local cinemas, sport clubs & shops. These places are relatively cheap to get into and are way less crowded than the big channels. I personally wrote 100 personal cards once on a budget of 50€ to get 4 orders worth 20.000€. It has good leverage if done well, because almost nobody does it anymore. When was the last time you received a hand written card which was not a bill from one of your gas, phone or electricity providers ? Exactly, never.

12. Stick with your marketing plan

If you want to burn a lot of money with no lasting effect on your target group change your marketing, name of your company and products as often as you can. Stick with your plan to safe money and have bigger impact on your audience even if you face adversity from time to time. Only change after long and thorough investigation and with an alternative planned which has proven often to be higher yield for the same effort. Again learn from Procter & Gamble if you doubt my words.

13. Make your marketing appeal to all senses

A marketing message which includes visuals, fragrance, sound and can be touched will always have higher impact than marketing which uses just one or some of these elements. One of our partners at Hubspot did a great job applying this principle by bringing in oranges which had his logo and some "marketing wisdom" stuck to them.

14. 80% of product launches will fail in the first three months

Good old pareto principle in actio. Knowing this can save you a lot of money by trying your campaigns for three months, have the right evaluation criteria in place and discontinue them when they turn out to be a flop rather than paying money to market a product which flopped anyway. The hammerpants are a great example of marketing which should have been stopped after the first three months. "Stop, Hammertime".

15. Purchases are rated on how they bring status

Whether it is consciously or not you purchase most things except from food on the basis whether they bring you status or not. You might not want to admit to yourself in all instances, but if you really think about it it boils down to this. Same is true for your prospects.

16. A lot of what happens in the brain is emotional, not cognitive

I fall in this trap quiet a lot myself. Always remember that emotion is a stronger driver for action than ratio and design your marketing messages accordingly. Sell the steak and the sizzle, not just one of the two.

17. The easiest way of getting into someones mind is to be first

One of my favorites on this list. If you are first and it is relevant to your prospect you will formulate the blueprint for evaluation for every other product or service the client will be looking at. Try it yourself with researching something via Google you do not know anything about. The first article you will read will majorly influence how you will skim and scan the following.

18. Ignore conventional logic

The stickiness of marketing messages depends on a great deal on being unexpected or counter intuitive. Challenge conventional logic whilst remaining relevant to your prospects to set yourself apart from the mish mash of every day marketing clutter.

19. Use oversimplified messages

Keep it short and simple. Now new, but belongs on this list.

20. Make mistakes

Someone who never makes mistakes will never get better. The best way of learning and seeing which products work and which do not or which campaigns work and do not is by constant trial and error while maintaining improvement in increments.

21. Effectiveness has priority one, efficiency priority two

Anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing lousy and you shouldn't be efficient at something which should not be done in the first place. Being the only marketer creating a campaign for the most boring clients including the ugliest pictures and most profane content is still better than being the best ping pong player in the entire company because you avoid these projects, as you deem them to be an insult to your intellect. This might be true, but misses the point.

Looking forward to the discussions with you in the comments. What did i forget ? What do you disagree with ? How can this post be made even better (and please don't say by taking it off the internet ;))?

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Points 1 - 4 have been inspired or directly taken from

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into friends, and friends into customers by Seth Godin

Points 5 - 8 have been inspired or directly taken from

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Points 9 - 12 have been inspired or directly taken from

Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson

Points 13 - 17 have been inspired or directly taken from

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

Points 18 - 21 have been inspired or directly taken from

Positioning, The battle for your mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout

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