What Most Marketing Professionals Don’t Know About Marketing

This article is guest posted by RichKidMedia’s Chief Strategy Officer (weirdly awesome job title eh?), Alan – my dad.

My dad is also an entrepreneur and the manager of my mom’s event organizing business. Makes me think about the ol’ question “Do You Think Entrepreneurship Runs In The Blood?” (majorly epic long haired dude talking :-)

Without further ado, let’s jump in to the article…

Only 8 words on what marketing is and how it applies to your internet marketing business.

When I started out, I too did not get marketing right. I thought that marketing is selling. I also thought that it included advertising, slogans, logos and design of packages. Not wrong, but too narrow a definition.

I dug the site of the American Marketing Association and here’s how they define it:  “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

That’s 27 words in there and I don’t think that explanation is clear enough for you to kick start your internet business. Wikipedia’s definition is even longer – 3 times that long.

Here’s my 8 word definition of marketing: Providing More Value To More People More Often.

Remember these words: Value, People, Often. And don’t forget, More.

Let’s chop these down.

Provide More Value

Most people are uneasy with selling. In fact, most are afraid to sell. They think that selling is for the fast talker who would do everything to get the sale. And sadly, the sales industry is littered with such people.

Selling is helping people. Selling is giving value. And value is perceived from the customer’s end. What’s In It For Them?

In selling, you make sure that you and your customer both win in the deal. It’s  “quid pro quo.”  I give you this – you give me that. That is why in your salesletter,  you say that if the customer is not satisfied, he can return the product and you will promptly refund his money.

Most of the internet marketers are selling information. Information in the form of ebooks, audio or video. To increase the perceived value, some smart marketers have even converted these digital products into physical stuff.  (Even in the digital economy, people still prefer things they can touch and thumb through).  Look at the 3-ring binders, manuals, and CDs they are sending.

To More People

Remember Kidblogger’s formula for making money online? It’s called MARCOM. Market Reach + Conversion = Money.

Market Reach = website visitors + email subscribers

The more people you drive to your site, the more money you make. Dozens of ways to do this. Think of Social Bookmarking, Press Releases, Video Marketing, Guest Blogging on authority sites, PPC, Article Marketing, Blog Commenting, Forum Marketing, Tarantula Linking, etc.

Or just go over Carl’s 69 ways to build backlinks and drive hundreds of visitors to your site. And if you’re in for the long term in your internet business, don’t forget to capture your website visitors contact information.

More Often

Some marketers call this increasing the lifetime value of the customer. You’ve spent a great amount of time getting that customer, so why not make the most of it. Don’t ever think of making only one sale to your existing customer – think of multiple sales.

One brilliant way to do this is make many offers to that existing customer over time. That’s where the autoresponder comes in. I can only recommend two: Aweber and Getresponse.

You load related marketing messages in your autoresponder. At a predetermined time and sequence, these messages get into the inbox of your subscribers and customers. If you plan to send 3 emails a month, that’s equivalent to 36 messages a year! All messages are preloaded with links to your products or affiliate offers.

With an autoresponder you can also broadcast special messages from other people’s products. It’s hard to imagine a successful internet marketer without a contact capture method provided by an autoresponder.

Another way to increase lifetime value is providing residual offers. This is where your customer pays you over and over for the same offer. Membership sites and web hosting are some examples.

Got it? …Again…Again. What is Marketing?