Digital Marketing: Easy? or Not really!

This blog is based on Appelo (2015) who is an entrepreneur, CEO of Happy Melly on how not to chase customers away through using digital marketing. He explains how he pick his vendors (but not beggars) by sharing stories about his own experience when choosing a product/service. By emailing someone and introducing/broadcasting about what you are doing may not be a smart way to draw their attention, yet more likely to be treated as spam.

Here are the three golden rules of marketing:

  1. Pull, don’t push.

Make sure that people can find you using Google, social networks and/or market places. Attract them with great content.

How many of you have heard of a story like this?

Boy meets girl.

They fall in love.

Boy loses girl.

Girl finds out his real secret (being a vampire).

They finally get back together.

They get married.

How and why they break up and what they do to get back together are what make the story interesting. It would surely be better than something like this:

Boy meets girl.

They fall in love.

They get married.

Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online platforms are giving organizations an enormous opportunity to engage directly with your customers or would-be customers. So instead of bugging and annoying them with advertising and direct mail, you can create online content – blog posts, videos, webinars and websites –  that will attract customers to you, not the other way around (Handley and Chapman, 2012).

2. Show, don’t tell.

Make sure people can see with their own eyes that you are awesome. Those who are cool and remarkable do not need to say it. This is considered one of the most valuable secrets of writing (for both creative fiction and marketing) because it relies on the imagination of the audience.

Much like in the movie Inception, your goal is to plant an idea in the mind of your prospect without them being fully aware of it. A person is more likely to perform an action when it’s inspired by their own idea, not someone else telling them to (Print Marketing Blog – Printwand™, n.d.).

This strategy can be applied to any sort of advertising, whether it’s online or print collateral. If you’re still at a loss for how to get started, try answering these three questions.

  1. What do you want your prospect to do?
  2. How do they need to feel about your product/service in order to do it?
  3. What specific features about your product/service might make them feel this way?

Show, don’t tell: Visual content is a brand’s digital best friend (AMA TV, 2014)

3. Share, don’t beg.

Do not annoy everyone with 20th-century marketing tactics. Thanks to transparency, when you behave like a beggar, everyone will know.

This will involve inbound marketing – things you can do on the web that earn traffic and attention but don’t directly cost money (Fishkin and Høgenhaven, 2013). Don’t buy. Don’t beg. Don’t bludgeon. It is all about earning attention and love. The channels with the highest ROI are often those do not invest in it – so much potential there! The inbound marketing is not free, it takes time and money to create and distribute phenomenal content yet it is often a more-effective marketing strategy than paid marketing.

People that broadcast to complete strangers — “Hello? Can I please tell you about my awesome services?” — violate all three rules. Smart businesses don’t need this approach anymore!!!!

 

References

Appelo, J. (2015). Your Marketing Is Chasing Customers Away! Here’s Why.. [online] Entrepreneur. Available at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244960 [Accessed 28 Apr. 2015].

AMA TV, (2014). Show, don’t tell: Visual content is a brand’s digital best friend. [online] Available at: http://amatv.ama.org/show-dont-tell-visual-content-is-a-brands-digital-best-friend [Accessed 28 Apr. 2015].

Fishkin, R. and Høgenhaven, T. (2013). Inbound marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog. John Wiley & Sons.

Handley, A. and Chapman, C. (2012). Content rules. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.

Print Marketing Blog – Printwand™, (n.d.). Understanding the “Show, Don’t Tell” Marketing Strategy. [online] Available at: http://www.printwand.com/blog/understanding-the-show-dont-tell-marketing-strategy [Accessed 27 Apr. 2015].

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