A Few Marketing Tips That Will Help You With Your Business
It took me years to recognize that strategy based too heavily on superior product was not good enough, and I’m still working, I have to admit, on the critical decision of when to change the plan. So I’d like to save you some of the trouble I previously experienced, and suggest that the following listed are 3 truths that you should know.
1. Great marketing beats great product.
This is the grim truth. The full form of this statement is that stellar marketing for mediocre product will almost always beat mediocre marketing of stellar product.
Want proof? look a few of the real winners of this century: they are all marketing driven. Amazon.com, Facebook, Zappos? That’s nothing more than great marketing, they took an idea, product, or service that was already being undertaken by another company and they revolutionized it.
Apple perhaps, with its “extremely great” products? I would have to argue that Apple’s design as well as Steve Jobs’ and Steve Wozniak’s success story is certainly more marketing genius than innovative product. There were several MP3 players before the iPod, multifunctional smart phones before iPhone, and tablet computers before the iPad, however, the marketing strategy apple used was unparalleled by any other company before it .
2. Real people beat real money.
The world is changing at an incredibly fast rate. Big companies spend tons money on big ads in big media outlets, however, people prefer local, authentic and real people. Lots of Davids beat the Goliaths. People want focused, segmented and local, and they want to identify with an individual in a personal manner and be seen as a person rather than just another number.
People care about the company’s story, and the people that contributed to that company’s story.” I believe that. I would argue that Apple’s success feels a lot like Steve Jobs’ success, and Amazon.com is Jeff Bezos’, and Zappos is Tony Hsieh’s. And then there’s Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. There are several examples of this.
Guess who’s winning in the new world; Facebook, Twitter, and others like them? The real winners are smaller companies run by individuals who share their authentic selves and utilize these larger companies to legitimize their businesses. 3. Consistency beats brilliance.
The full form of this one is: better a sub-par marketing plan which is consistently applied over several years than a series of brilliant strategies, each with a few months tenure, each contradicting its predecessor.
That’s another one, like the first one here, that I call sad but true. If you define marketing like I do, getting people to know, like and trust you, then you have to realize that it takes being the same you – whether that’s a personalized company you or a larger company brand – over a long period of time. Every time you reinvent your brand, you start back at zero and negate all that you have done before whether it be good or bad. A lot of people might not know this but 10 years ago before Steve Jobs took over Apple it was 90 days from going bankrupt.
Of Course, in real-world marketing you can not keep doing something that isn’t working just because it’s in your plan. But, on the contrary, with any normal marketing strategy you as well as your whole team may be bored stiff with a marketing strategy long before it begins to make a significant impact on those people you want to reach. You need to give it some time, and you need to stick with it until it’s just not working, not just until you’re bored with its implementation.
Its unrealistic to expect to hit the bullseye with every arrow. But you have to keep trying until you do.