1. Marketing is NOT Dead

There has been some talk on the street that marketing is dead.

Marketing is not dead. Marketing is evolving, and we need to start thinking differently!

Realistically, how could marketing ever die?…it encompasses everything you do to connect with your audience, educate them about your products and services, and sell more stuff.

Marketing will always have a place. We’ll just do it differently.

It’s already happening, selling and promoting is looking a heck of a lot less like selling and promoting and more like entertainment, helpful advice and information.

There’s a lot of noise out there, after all. If we just jump in with the crowd and start shouting we aren’t going to be heard.

This blog will share advice to help you be heard!

2. Marketing is Sales (and Marketing Supports Sales)

It’s generally known around companies with separate marketing and sales departments, that if tough times arrive, the marketing people will be the first to go.

I worked in B2B sales many years ago for IBM, and I was really good. There’s a lot of job security when you’re in that position.

But here’s the kicker, if I was just out selling, and IBM was not also marketing, my job would have been a lot more difficult.

It’s the difference between trying to sell a brand that no one has heard of, and trying to sell a brand that people already like.

Marketing is the pre-sell. If we’re talking about social media, it opens a dialogue and creates a relationship. If we’re talking about inbound and content marketing, it turns everything inside out and results in clients contacting you. It’s word of mouth.

Is there really a difference between someone buying because they spoke to a sales person, or someone buying because they watched a helpful YouTube video about your product? Marketing is that YouTube video.

That, my friends, is why I believe Marketing is Sales

3. Customer Experience is Marketing

Customer experience is the experience customers and potential customers have when they come in contact with your business.

If you own a group of restaurants it’s their experience with your waitstaff, the food, the atmosphere, your website, whether they did or did not enjoy themselves and all the other things that come together to affect how likely they would be to recommend you to a friend.

Customer experience is marketing because it’s what your customers say about you. Make no mistake about it – good or bad – it’s still word of mouth.

You’ve heard about the studies that find a satisfied customer will tell 3 people about their experience, and an unsatisfied customer will tell 10 or more.

Well in this day and age an unsatisfied customer can use the Internet to tell thousands, or millions of people.

Case in point, remember that musician whose guitar was broken a few years back on a United Airlines flight? Not only did he watch them break it, they wouldn’t reimburse him.

So, he did what anyone can do, and created a YouTube video about the experience. It went viral.

As of today his video has received 12.7 MILLION views. Don’t tell me that’s not (horrid) marketing for United Airlines.

Watch the video here if you’re curious. It’s now a book as well!

Customer experience is something you’ll see me talk and give advice about in this blog. If you have a bad reputation we need to get the house in order so your message doesn’t fall on angry ears.

4. You Must be Different

I talk a lot about all the noise created by marketers and advertisers these days. It is no longer enough to just put yourself out there. You must differentiate.

Scroll up and look again at the photo I used to open this post. Which rock are you drawn to, which begs to be picked up and explored?

“The brown one”. It’s so different in fact that I’m going to guess that it’s not rock at all, it’s pumice. You must be like that piece of pumice on the beach!

This is a big topic and I look forward to delving into it in future posts.

5. You Can Measure Your Results

If you have marketing programs in place, but aren’t measuring your results – I want to help!

I’ll be blogging on this topic over the coming year because it’s something I am very passionate about. I hate seeing businesses throw their money and resources at something without an inkling of whether it’s actually working.

So let’s make 2013 the year to start measuring our marketing!