Marketing is the lifeblood of any business.
Leadership is critical. The vision vital. Product, service and attention to detail all important but what good will any of that, do you if no ones know about you.
That’s the job of marketing.
Now before I lose some of you, I would like to state that we are all marketers in one form or another.
After all, we market ourselves day in and day out.
We market our qualities to potential partners, we market our abilities to our bosses, we market our ideas to our children. Marketing, you see, is about changing minds.
That’s what Pepsi, Jack In The Box, Honda, Apple and every other business out there aims to achieve with their commercials.
They want you to be open to trying their product over your current brand.
It is no easy task.
Marketing announces to the world, “Hey look at me. I’m over here. Check out what I can do.”
And whether you work for a business or run your own, marketing is the key element to your success.
So just how do we market ourselves in today’s world?
Books have been written to answer just that question, but let me make it simple for you.
I’ve come up with three tips that, if applied, will put you in a whole different class from your competition.
- Education
- Tools
- Original
To start with, put your study cap on. There’s no need to start from scratch. People out there with far much more money and experience than you have tried and tested thousands of ideas and they can be yours for as little as $60 (less if you go secondhand). Here are just a few books that come to mind that would be well worth adding to your arsenal:
- Guerrilla Marketing
- Influence
- Permission Marketing
- Endless Referrals
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
- Good to Great
Remember, education is where it all begins. Education saves us time and frustration, but only if we’re willing to invest the time to learn what secrets lie within the books out there.
As for tools, I’m a big believer in using everything you can to give you an edge.
Today that means using social media to help get your message out there.
Personally, I judge many companies by the websites they have; missing links, incomplete data, no updates are, to me, warnings.
Here’s what poorly updated sites tell me, “Hey, I don’t really care about this site cuz I’m too busy doing something else.”
But maybe that’s just me. How do you feel when you stumble onto such sites?
Those companies choosing not to use social media tools such as Twitter and FB are missing a golden opportunity. Heck, they’re free. And they can be used in a variety of ways, but most importantly announcing new products, information, seminars and just useful information that your clients and potential customers might find valuable.
If you’ve invested time and money into reading and using the tools available to you then here’s the final piece of the puzzle – originality.
Tried and true techniques work, but when you’re trying to be noticed sometimes it pays to break the norm.
As they say in sports, “Go hard or go home.” Always be thinking:
- How can I stand out from my competitors?
- What does my company or I do better than anyone else?
Check out what Alex Tanney did on YouTube…simply astonishing and guess what? He got a call from a few professional teams asking him to try out for spring training. Just goes to show you that with a little creativity, talent and marketing can get you.
Get marketing today and watch your influence grow.
Adrian Shepherd