Internet marketing Archives - Page 14 of 18 by Mark Murnahan

Creative Marketing: How Important is Creativity in Marketing?

There is a lot of math and science in marketing, but just how important is creativity in marketing? Regardless what you may believe, creativity still holds much emphasis in successful marketing. If you look around the huge marketing arena of the Internet, you can see what I mean, illustrated in a squillion different ways.

You will see companies who believe that simply being listed at the top of a search engine result is all that matters. It matters, a lot, but without giving people something to rave about once they find you, and converting them into customers, fans, or something other than a ten second click, it is worthless.

If you doubt me, just question why you have heard of Nike, and not that other shoe and athletic apparel company who tried so hard to make you a customer. If you think it just comes down to massive amounts of money to spend, you surely forgot that Microsoft started in a garage. The founders knew what it meant to be creative, and they made that creativity clear in their market outreach. This can mean consumer marketing as well as marketing to investors, so make no mistake on that.

Marketing creativity is what makes things popular, and takes ideas to the next level. An example is the way Roche Applied Science, a company dealing in genome sequencing made something so geeky and scientific as apoptosis a fun topic. They knew who their market was, and reached them with their massively successful “Cell Death Tour” marketing campaign.

Marketing creativity is also what Matt Harding did for Stride Gum when he produced a video with 27,267,455 views and counting. It was creative enough that millions of people passed it along to their friends.

The list of examples is long, but I will try to keep this short by explaining that creative marketing often makes the difference between a ten second click and a massively successful market reach.

Creative Marketing Drags You by the Nose

You can try to ignore it, but what drags you by the nose to embrace a brand is the work of the creative marketer. Some may say that their market is more logic-based and that people are just looking at the numbers. Even if that is the case, they should really be looking at the explosion of numbers that happens with creative marketing that is perfectly crafted to reach the target.

Sure, marketing is a numbers game, and with enough numbers, anything can be a success. While many Internet marketers fight to be more visible, and with high-traffic to Websites being rewarded with unrealistic hopes, creative marketing is often neglected. I sometimes think that this is one of the top reasons so many people are getting the shaft from Internet marketers who make big promises about traffic, while having little idea what actually motivates a market.

Creative Marketing Does Not Just Mean Cute

When I say creative marketing, I do not just mean delivering a creative message, but also how to reach the right audience, and not just any audience. Reaching a lot of people is great. It allows the opportunity for people to share the message with the audience you seek. However, it also leaves a lot of chances that your marketing wheels are left spinning and stuck in the mud.

A Creative Marketing Proposal

As I was preparing a marketing proposal just yesterday, I was thinking about how to provide the best reach into the client’s target market. I had discussed the client’s marketing objectives enough to create a nine page well considered proposal. It dealt with many areas of math, geography, and demographics, but there was something more. While I was proofreading the proposal, I got to thinking about what makes marketers different. What is that key element that sets the great apart from the good in marketing? When I reached the portion of my marketing proposal dealing with cost where it explained that we do not breed elves, it struck me. Creative thinking is one area that truly sets marketers apart more than any other. I already knew this, but the tricky part is in expressing it.

Here is a portion of the marketing proposal, but I offer you this preface: Call me crazy if you like, but I am not a salesman. I give the facts, and I try to deliver it in a unique way. I will also add, as you may find here, that I do not seek everybody willing to drop a few dollars and dip their toe into the marketing pool to test the water. There are sharks in there, and I never want to see a client’s leg bit off by dipping their toe in. I want that diamond client that I was able to carefully carve out of the rough and polish with care. I want the one who is not afraid to be successful. I want the one who understands marketing creativity and the huge value it offers. When the client “gets it” I am ready to get to work. When they just want to follow the flock of sheep off the edge of the cliff, they call somebody else.

INVESTMENT IN YOUR BUSINESS

We see it all too often that price is the concern rather than wise investment in a company’s success. Our job is to increase the bottom line of your company. We don’t chase unicorns or offer elf breeding. Our work is based on real data, using real science that really works. This is not myth, and the return you receive will reflect the investment you make. In order to create massive success, you simply cannot do it with minimal investment, or with marginal marketing providers, as you have already witnessed.

In order to achieve both short-term and long-term results for your brand, we seek an initial budget of $25,000 with ongoing services to be recommended only following 30 day, 60 day, and 90 day benchmarking. We will not come back and ask for more money without a very good reason, and if we do, it is best that you spend it.

This initial budget will allow us to focus on the quality and quantity of your reach, and the creativity to achieve high conversion of your prospects into active customers and money in your pocket. It also provides the opportunity for proper benchmarking in order to make determinations of a performance-based opportunity between our companies.

The question of high quality and sustainable marketing should not include any questions of whether it is worth it. We will be pleased to provide enough quantitative data to show the value. The only question we allow room for is whether our clients care about their business enough to make a wise investment in its future.

Are you reaching your market with a voice of authority or are you at the mercy of a market that is not what you hoped for?

I find that many companies fail to bring a sense of authority to their marketing. It is time to improve that right now. Let us consider where marketing authority comes from, and why so many businesses are lacking it.

This world is made up of people … flawed people … every last one of them. Businesses are made up of one or more of these flawed people, so can you really expect perfection to come from that? Of course not, and those flaws often come through in the same ways in business as they do in the flawed people’s personal psychology. This makes perfect sense, right?

Lack of authority is a weakness for many people and it comes with insecurity, which often comes from lack of proper information. Fear is a strong emotion, and one that can wreck your hopes of bringing authority to your marketing. With all of the right facts and figures to draw from, it starts to look like science, and that makes it harder to deny. It also makes it much easier to have confidence and to market with authority!

How do we begin to repair that lack of authority and reach your market with confidence? I want to offer you some ideas.

Define Your Authority

If you are marketing pizza, and people tell you it is the best pizza, they offer you authority. Take it and use it! Stop being afraid. If enough people say that your pizza is the best in town, all of the sudden, guess what … it is! Testimony is a hugely important factor in court trials … even the court trials that get people hanged by the neck until dead. Shouldn’t your customers’ testimony be enough to give you authority, too?

Sales Volume Does Not Equal Authority

It is really easy for companies (flawed people) to perceive their authority to be diminished when sales are slumping. It begins a downward spiral. I will stick with pizza for this example. If you are marketing pizza and a Pizza Hut or other chain moves in and captures a piece of your market, does that mean your pizza is not still as good as it was? Sometimes this is the case, but as an after-effect, and not as the cause.

If you have good pizza to market, be sure to market it with the same authority that it deserves, and not based on the mood you awakened to on a given day. It is really easy to get this wrong, but a common and very inappropriate response to the marketplace. Remember that only because Pizza Hut sells a lot more pizza than you do it does not mean they take authority away from your brand.

Uphold your Authority

If you convey authority, there is an inherent responsibility to uphold that authority. I believe it is easy for people to forget all of the things that give them authority in their marketplace. This is especially true when their authority is questioned. Tragically, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it is questioned from the inside.

You can see this all around you, if you look for it. Just consider how many companies you can find that beg for business instead of taking the time and effort to become an authority, and project that authority in their marketing.

I see this problem more often in smaller companies, but weak efforts and asking to be right are problems of companies in all sizes. It seems that it often comes with an uncertainty of how others perceive a business, rather than having a rock solid position that the company is better than the competition, and knowing why.

Are You an Authority?

Maybe you are already an authority in your field but you just don’t know why, or how to prove it. If you are not an authority, maybe it is your time to get there. The odds are pretty good that you are an authority at something. Come on … there has to be something. Start with that “something” and grow it! Lastly, don’t neglect to push your marketing “Go” button!

Push Your Marketing “Go” Button

People dream up a lot of excuses to postpone positive action in their business. In decades of serving clients with marketing services, I must have heard them all. I want to distill a bit of that for you here, and hopefully boost your courage a bit.

I often feel like a police officer listening to peoples’ excuses for speeding. I mean, I should write another book just filled with the awful excuses I have heard from businesses over the years for how and why they messed everything up. By the time it gets to the “judge”, all of those excuses only embarrass the “speeder”. Now put all excuses aside and tell me if you can relate to this. I’ll bet it will sound kind of familiar. You may get a laugh, or you may get a fright.

Let’s first get one thing straight: If your business was simple, everybody would be doing it, and you would be out of a job. Business has its challenges, but there are huge rewards for doing the things others are unwilling or afraid to do.

Money Can Stop Business in Its Tracks!

One thing that seems to stop most businesses in their tracks is money. Actually, the lack of money, or fears surrounding money is what kills them. I have found that money is one of the greatest concerns to most business people. Imagine that! This one basic requisite of business is the same thing stopping them from having more of this one basic thing. It is like a loop … without more money, they don’t have more money. With more money, they get more money. It is crazy how that works, don’t you think?

I have found that with enough money, even a pretty bad business person can at least begin to solve most business issues. Money cannot fix it all, but more money can certainly help to solve the most common business problems. Money can buy better attorneys, it can buy better accountants, and it can buy better talent in most every area of a business. Let’s not lie … at least not to yourself. Sure, lie to me if you must, but really, just think about how much more you can do with a business if you have more money. I know this and you know this, so let’s not beat around that bush.

REMEMBER THIS: In business, the bottom line starts with a dollar sign.

When it comes down to it, money is the biggest reason people make bad decisions in their business, or worse yet, make no decisions at all. It paralyzes people and it clouds their judgment. So the big concern is how to bring a business beyond that hurdle of money.

How do you get your hands on more money? Do you beg a bank for more money? Do you rob a bank, a train, or a liquor store? How about this for an idea? Do more of the things that your business does to generate revenue. In many businesses, this means finding more people to buy a product or service, but in nearly every case it means finding more people … or them finding you!

A Look at Your Marketing Funnel

Let us look at your marketing funnel. I will use the basic idea of a marketing funnel to explain my point. At the top, where the funnel is the widest, you have the people who are aware of your offering. As the funnel narrows, you have people who are thinking about you and may become a customer someday. Closer to the bottom where the money gushes out, you have those hot prospects urgently grabbing their credit cards or check books to do business with you. This is just a basic introduction to the marketing funnel, but you get the point, right? Now let’s look at a couple ways people hurt their business waiting on the marketing funnel.

Waiting for Slower Times

Something I see very troubling in many businesses is that they hold off on their marketing until that biggest bulk of their current sales funnel comes through before they think it is time to get busy marketing. Instead of keeping the funnel full and adding more to it, they wait and see how things come through the funnel before they take action and push the “go” button.

This happens for a couple reasons. One excuse I sometimes hear is that the business is so busy they don’t have time to look forward to the next big rush of customers coming through the funnel. When they are not too busy, they cannot afford to market the business properly. So they go through these violent changes in business … up one day, down the next. The business is like a roller coaster ride.

Being “too busy” is as bad as the lie a teenage boy tells his girlfriend in the back seat of the car … at night … at a scenic overlook. Yeah, lie to a girlfriend, but don’t lie to me. I already heard this one.

Everybody has the same 24 hours in a day, and successful business people make time to be sure their business will still survive after the funnel slows down again. When I hear people say they are too busy to care for their future, I often find that they are simply not marketing in a way that is sustainable. They are the same kind who run a big special when they need more business, and they will have to do it again in a few months or weeks. They often waste a ton of money by marketing in this way, and die early from all of the stress it causes.

A better answer is to create a steady flow of business and make the peaks and valleys smoother. Scheduling is easier, accounting is easier, and production is easier. Everything becomes much more profitable and enjoyable with a sustained marketing plan instead of acting from urgency.

NOTE: This kind of business person commonly lies about their business health. They say they are busy, but it is often because they are busy trying to pay back all of the debt they created the last time the funnel went dry. This is sadly a very common approach taken by small business owners.

Waiting for Better Times

I am often reminded of something my mother told me many years ago. She said “Mark, if you wait until you are ready to have kids, you will never be a father.” I am glad I heard her advice, because today I have three children that bring huge amounts of joy to my life, and the lives of many others.

I think of this as the person who is just waiting for a big windfall to come. They have it all mixed up by believing they will be ready to market their business after they gain enough business to afford a marketing plan. They have placed the money cart in front of the marketing horse. It is a very hopeful person who really believes in their business, but just not quite enough to take the necessary risks to make it successful.

I usually find these people to be very energetic and hopeful. They are refreshing, because they come with the positivity of a child. They also often come with the budget of a child, but if you talk to them in six months or a year, all of that will be miraculously sorted out and they will be ready to push the go button then.

The harshest reality for this person is how much time and money they wasted by doing what they thought would minimize their risk. The worst risk for them of all was inaction. Not doing what they should have done has cost them dearly, both in actual loss and in opportunity loss.

I will hear from this person again, in their next venture. They will be ready to get their marketing plan started in another six months or a year.

Assumptions and Fears About Marketing

I watch a lot of people make assumptions about marketing, and they bolster those assumptions with fear. Call it fear, apprehension, diligence, or whatever you like. Waiting around and thinking about it until it paralyzes your business is not the answer. Taking action and being brave in your decisions is in order.

I have heard a lot of stories, and one I have heard a lot is “Oh, but you must be so expensive.” Here is something to think about: The expensive thing about marketing is trying to make more money without it. Thomas Jefferson said it well with this statement: “The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.” The reality is that marketing is what keeps your funnel full and makes businesses more money … not less.

I guess I could consider it kind of flattering when somebody looks at my experience and my marketing talent and makes the assumption that I must be extremely expensive. Wow, if I can make myself seem that valuable, don’t you wonder what happens to the value of your products or services when you push the go button?

I Gave You a Go Button!

I could go on a long time about the mistakes businesses make in their marketing considerations. The worst and most costly of all is to do nothing and wait on that marketing funnel to start pouring out the results without action on your part.

You have my permission to be successful in your business. In fact, you have my encouragement. There really is no better time, and things will not just better on their own. Go ahead and push the go button … Do it NOW!

How To Market SEO and Vertical Internet Marketing

Here are some delicious tater chips for your enjoyment. Many SEO / Internet marketing and non-SEO people alike took notice of my recent article on how to sell SEO (and compare SEO). It is a pretty important topic for anybody hoping to do more business using the Internet. So, I thought I would write a piece on how to market SEO, but as before, this is not just for the SEO and Internet marketing folks. Whether you sell SEO services, fishing lures, or potato chips, this article can help you, too.

Don’t get confused just yet if you are not in the fields of sales or marketing. This should help to get your thoughts in the right place, too.

Sales and Marketing Are Not The Same!

I want to get this point clear first. Sales and marketing are so often intertwined that some people just look at them as the same thing. Please pay close attention. Sales and Marketing are not the same thing!

People in the fields of sales and marketing often realize this, but even they will get this mixed up a lot of times. Sure, the two disciplines of selling and marketing both have the similar focus of driving more dollars into your pocket with super-fantastic return on investment (you know, ROI). If you seek the definitions in many places, you may even find these two terms to be very similar. The truth is that they are different … they are vertical, but not the same. I can tell you that many salespeople know a similar amount about marketing analytics as their marketing counterpart knows about being bitten by that dog that answered the door on the last sales call.

Some people have called me a great salesman. They clearly missed something, because I actually kind of stink as a salesman in some ways. I give them the proof they want, but I am not about to grovel to the lowest bidder … that is just not my style. If I have to ask somebody to buy what I do, I consider it a failure in my marketing. This is because if the marketing is done right, the sale should be nothing but the fun part. Really, if somebody wants a big sales pitch, I just tell them to get a pen handy so I can have them call some of my customers … or even better, read more of my blog.

So argue if you must (that is why I allow your comments), but let us look at this as Internet sales being when somebody clicks your “buy” button or rings your phone, while marketing involves the sequence of events that led up to that wonderful (huge beam of light coming from the sky and angels singing) click that made your cash register ding.

Vertical Market? Guard your Wallet!

I do not like those industry terms people toss around just to sound smart or to throw the customer off long enough to grab their wallet. I have made fun of this in the past, because it is often designed to obscure the message just enough to distract a smart and hard working person who just doesn’t have a reason to know everything about cytology, acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, or how to bring more customers to their business.

If you are not a marketing person, you may not understand a vertical market compared to a horizontal market, or a skazmodic market. OK, I made that last one (skazmodic) up just for fun. You are not expected to know everything about marketing. Seriously, nobody knows everything about marketing, and the majority of the world’s population has another discipline to focus on. Should a dentist know as much about marketing as a marketer knows about dentistry? Not at all, but I can tell you that either of them is just as important in whether you eat or not. Without good marketing, most of what you know in this world would look a whole lot different.

So you may ask, what is a vertical market? Let me break the term “vertical market” down for you. If you are selling fishing lures, it is a vertical of fishing supplies, which is a vertical of outdoor sports. Other vertical markets are camping supplies, and hunting, but fishing lures will probably never be a part of aircraft repair (and if so, please choose a different airline).

Wikipedia includes the description of a vertical market as follows:

“The activities of participants within any given vertical market are typically similar in that they aim at solving the same or similar problems. These markets are typically competitive, due to the overlapping focuses of the products and services that are provided to the customers.”

Love Your Vertical Market … I Do!

In the SEO profession or in any market, I suggest falling in love with your vertical market. Get to know this market and it will not take very long to realize that your vertical market is chock full of mutually-beneficial assets. With this considered I use SEO as my example. Surely you can see how SEO is a vertical of website design, web development, web hosting, technology, marketing, advertising, and more. These are markets for the SEO professional to consider as their friends. Yes, vertical markets are your friends! Do not mistake this, because if you do it will hurt your bottom line whether you sell SEO / Internet marketing, fishing lures, or potato chips.

Any marketer worth the water they are made of should be highly aware of the vertical markets of their clients. Sadly for marketers, as so many marketers seem to be fighting for the same dollars, they forget about their own vertical market. For example, I am a search engine optimizer (SEO), but if you think that means I do not work very closely with other SEO, you must think I am totally stupid. These folks are my closest allies, and often my best clients. That is because as with any industry, we each have specific skills and when we put those skills together, we get a whole lot more accomplished. Digg.com is really not a huge piece of my own personal work, but you can bet that I know a whole bunch of people to who leverage it massively. On the other hand, I have somewhat of a whacky way of producing content with massive appeal. I mean, I produce really great results with things I come up with after a gallon of coffee and a pack of cigarettes. I do all of the things an SEO does. I create content, I am a programmer of about every known language, I have wicked skills with incoming link production, I am highly active in a squillion social media venues, I write for a good handful of blogs, and so many other things. So am I out to grab up the whole market by myself? Heck no! Not at all, because the more meat on the bone for those friendly competitors, the more food is on my table, too.

This, my friends, is vertical marketing at its best. Never think you are so amazing that you should try to do it all by yourself. The best SEO people know where their marketing talent lies, just the way the heart surgeon knows that he doesn’t want to perform vasectomies.

Horizontal Market … Oh, Beautiful Sunrise!

If the sun rises with your horizontal market, there are still some pretty huge things to consider. If you are trying to sell your product or service to anybody and everybody, you do so at your own demise. Trust me … no wait … I hate that term, because it implies that I have been lying to you all along. Don’t trust me … just go find out for yourself how miserably you will fail at trying to reach the hundreds of millions of people who desperately need what you offer if you can just tell them all about it. Let me know how that went after you spend hundreds of squillions of dollars on that campaign. Just be sure you set a couple squillion aside for when you are ready to do it the right way.

Consider the massive potential customer base of a potato chip company. They must have a really easy marketing plan. All they have to do is tell everybody who eats potato chips how good their product is, right? Wrong! If this was the case, you would probably never see a potato chip company advertising that their product is fat-free, in earth-friendly packaging, cheesier than the rest, low salt, in a nice can so the chips don’t get broken, or any of the other things that segment their market based on targeted desires.

To the SEO / Internet marketing people reading this:
Let’s think about that vertical market and start working together.

To the rest of you:
Call me right now so I can get my vertical market to talking about targeted reasons that your potato chips taste so amazing.

Wow, did you see that coming? I have something that anybody with something to market needs, but I am calling my vertical market to action. It is fancy how that works, isn’t it?

Where Does Marketing Talent Come From?

Is there such a thing as natural ability in marketing? Some talents seem to come from birth, but like developing any talent, it takes time and hard work. Talent comes with a cost.

Marketing Talent Comes With a Cost

There is a hidden cost to marketing talent that is often difficult to realize. Whether you are hiring it out or trying to develop marketing talent for yourself, it has a cost … often a huge cost. So, where does marketing talent really come from, what is the cost to get it, and why are marketing talents not all equal? Allow me to explain.

Talent is Better with Practice

I have been fascinated recently with the 2010 Winter Olympics. The athletes are amazing, and their talent often seems humanly impossible. What makes it possible is a whole lot of passion, determination, and practice. Passion leads to determination and determination leads to practice. Passion and determination do nothing without the follow through of relentless practice. Apolo Ohno even crashed a few times before he went on to become the most decorated USA medalist in Winter Olympic history, but he kept practicing.

Maybe you have a talent that you are passionate about. Think about that talent you developed through passion. Maybe you went to school a long time for it, and maybe you practiced it long enough to get really good at it … best of all is practice. Can somebody else do it as well as you? If they can, they probably practiced more.

Marketing Talent Takes Risk

It was when I heard Bob Costas and the other announcers talking about Olympic athletes having similar DNA to race car drivers and other risk-takers that my ears perked up. I started thinking about the risks people take, how they calculate risks, and really how little most people are willing to risk. With minimal risk, there is minimal reward. Come on, we all know this, and it is true of everything from leaning in for the first kiss to becoming a huge success at something.

Here is a way I can relate to risk. I race cars. In fact, I race cars very well. Driving is something I am passionate about. It is a talent that I have worked on for years, spent thousands of hours practicing, and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to master. I also teach drivers what they need to know about driving. Imagine that. I get in a car with another driver and teach him or her how to go faster … fast enough to kill us both in an instant! Yes, I’ve got balls courage. I have courage the size of an aircraft carrier, but I have something else. I’ve got talent. The kind of talent that only comes from a whole lot of practice. That practice makes me just a little more immune to risk with each lap.

A common saying at a race track is that there is no such thing as natural ability. Oh, there may be some natural propensity (like good eyes and good reflexes), but the talent comes with practice. Really amazing talent comes with thousands of hours of practice. This goes for Olympic athletes, race car drivers, and yes, even marketers.

Good Marketing Talent Minimizes Your Risk

While knowing that each practice increases immunity to risk, I think about how much risk most people are willing to take in their business. Most businesses try to reduce their exposure to risk at every opportunity. They mop up the Vaseline spill in the doorway, they remove the balloon filled with broken glass hanging high above the atrium, and they buy insurance in case it all goes wrong. Doesn’t it beg the question of how they could logically reduce the risk of failure in their marketing efforts? Yes, I think that makes sense, too.

When you look for marketing talent and you wonder what you are paying for, remember this: Good Marketers Already Took the Risks. That means they already know what does not work, and they have the experience to know how to help you avoid doing the same. Not only that, really good marketing talent comes from the people who not only had a strong propensity to good marketing and passion for the work, but they have put in the countless hours of hard work, research, and practice … like the Olympic athlete or the race car driver.

Expensive Marketing Choices

When you consider developing marketing talent, consider your passion, time, and willingness to take risks. If you are passionate about your marketing but lack the time it takes to learn to skate like Apolo Ohno, drive like Emerson Fittipaldi, or market creatively like Pablo Picasso. Stop and consider the risks you could mitigate by sitting in the stands while the real marketing talent rounds the track for you. Be aware that you are paying them for the talent they developed with passion, determination and practice. You pay them for the risks they took that were a bit too ballsy courageous for your liking or your budget.

Do you want to go fast? You must decide carefully which risks to take, and it can be a lot less risky to hire somebody with marketing talent than to develop your own. After all, are you more likely to hop in a race car to create the show for everybody else or stay home and watch it from the safety of your sofa? Either will have a cost, but one takes a whole lot of time.

P.S. Here is what it looks like when I drive. I will leave out the failures it took to get there.