Please Stop Beating Me Over The Head!

All 254 of you who have sent letters to my Inbox are doing the Marketing Thing WRONG!

Your letters are going UNREAD.

They start out with lovely words like "Dear Ms. Duff, I have been following your career for many years and I congratulate you on your impressive accomplishments . . ." or "We are in Group XYZ together and I had to tell you how impressive I think you are . . ."

Then the letter writer goes on to tell me how much money I could save by using their mining equipment.  [In my business/financial writing career?] Or s/he congratulates me because I qualify for $1 million in financing that the bank won't give me. [I don't need hard-money financing -- or any financing, for that matter]. Some letters promise their writers can provide my company with hundreds of qualified employees. [I am a solo-preneur.]

When I read LinkedIn -- which is less and less often these days thanks to the aggressive lunkhead marketing -- I read the posts that interest me. I sometimes contact the writers if I like what they say and feel I have a need for their products or services.

I believe LinkedIn is getting inundated with attempts by lazy people to aggressively market their goods and services -- buy a month of Pro Membership and spam the whole membership. Pretty soon LinkedIn will be a swamp of misguided marketing and scammers, if it isn't already. I have been around the Internet community since the mid-1990s, and there is one favorite online document that still conveys good advice: The Cluetrain Manifesto [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cluetrain_Manifesto]

I can totally understand why you are marketing! We all need business! Unfortunately, sending out form letters to masses of people on LinkedIn is probably less effective than putting an ad in the Pennysaver. 

Just stop a moment and think about what you actually read on LinkedIn: information about your industry, reviews of products or services, interesting advice. Yes, you are always looking for new revenue streams, new potential customers and new ways of doing things better. When you read an interesting post, you have the ability to contact the person who wrote it. This is very efficient. For the person who wrote the post, you are a pre-qualified lead because you qualified yourself by initiating contact.

Did you ever stop to think that posting good information might bring you more business inquiries than sending hundreds of smarmy form letters about mining equipment to business writers?

Internet SPAM is so 1990s. The Internet allows you to talk directly with individuals all over the World. It allows you to develop relationships that could never have existed prior to the Internet. It allows you to demonstrate to masses of people that you know what you are doing, and in the process, supply them with your contact information in case they want to do business.

People want information. People want good ideas. Nobody wants you to demonstrate to them that you don't care enough about them to pay attention to the fact that they don't need your damn mining equipment or e-commerce solutions or human resources to manage thousands of employees easily.

The magic of marketing is that it creates a common bond between the seller and the buyer. When you don't recognize that, your marketing will fail.

The Internet allows you to inexpensively publish useful information and make it available for hundreds, thousands or even millions of people to read. The better your information, the more people who will read it. If the information is evergreen, it will continue to be shared and will continue to create business contacts for years. I still get calls from people who have read an article of mine, written years ago, and have tracked me down to do business.

Please consider personalizing your marketing -- particularly on LinkedIn.

• Use the tools available to you for targeting people who actually might be interested in what you have to sell.
• Stop sending those annoying letters that lie about the years you have spent following your target's career. 
• You don't need to send out thousands of form letters if you write only to people who actually might want to hear from you. Do your homework: research your audience.
• Talk about what you do and relate free information and advice. Potential customers will contact you.

Marketing is like a job interview. You won't get hired if you walk into the interview without knowing what the company does or what the job entails. You won't get hired if you don't demonstrate you can do the job. And you won't get hired if you act like a lazy jerk.

Victoria Duff -- aBusinessPlan.com