Photo: Micaela Heck / Angelica Alzona
Why is marketing so challenging for something that seems pretty simple? How can we do it more effectively? This week we’re learning how to improve our marketing skills with the help of entrepreneur and marketing expert Seth Godin. Listen to Seth’s insightful tips on the mentality we should have when it comes to our marketing strategy, how to find our audiences, and the common mistakes to avoid when you start marketing your business. Seth is the best-selling author of 20 books, including The dip, Tribes, The practice, and This is marketing. He is also the host of the Akimbo Podcast and author of his popular self-titled blog.
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Highlights from this week’s episode
From the interview with Seth Godin:
On the basics of marketing:
[Y]They need to matter to some people and not all of them ignore them. And mattering to some people, if you’re an Etsy seller, for example, doesn’t mean making the same cake toppers as every other Etsy seller and hoping that you’re somehow lucky enough to win the search. It’s about doing what only you can do and doing it for the smallest number of people you can support.
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When starting:
[Y]You have to fail. You have to postpone the work. You have to come up in front of people with an offer that says I did this and then see what they say in response. I made one hundred blog posts, two hundred blog posts before I had more than ten readers. And if I had waited until I had the first blog post that worked for me, I would still be waiting because you don’t get to the first until after you’ve made the one hundred or two hundred that are not quite right. And it’s cheaper, way cheaper to do that today than ever before, when Ford made the Edsel it cost you a billion dollars to be wrong on a new car model, while now you can model a car on YouTube- Video and see what the world is saying.
About planning when to abandon a strategy:
You should plan before you spend a dollar if you want to give up. So if I were to build a brand that sold I don’t know sweatshirts or mics I’d say okay, I’ll run these ads for six months and not change my plan for six months. I’m going to come and come and come because people have to see a message twenty-seven times before they can even register on the internet. It’s even more than that because there is so much noise. If you want to spend that money, it has to start with a commitment. You don’t want to spend your money on an ad and then decide.
To learn more about Seth’s wise marketing advice, we recommend listening to the entire episode.
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