Understanding marketing

By the time a child graduates from high school, they may have seen 360,000 ads. When we grow up and need to promote out interests, it’s really hard to not be affected by that. When people try to find the words that will convince strangers to become our customers, the familiar words that come to mind are from all those ads we’ve been exposed to. And they are the wrong words. I moderate groups on LinkedIn with over 100,000 combined members, so I see a lot of people posting what I call "drive by" ad bombs. They make no attempt at engagement. It's basically a spam strategy. They know it will be ignored by nearly everyone, but if "just one" person pays attention and…

Marketing is how you bring people into contact with your business so you can sell to them. That makes it both different from sales, and yet vital to sales. It's easy to overly focus on social media and digital marketing because it can be cheap and easy. But there is a lot more to marketing that every business needs to consider. For example, are you in the right business? Marketing can be strategic because it has to decide out of the whole world of people, who should it reach out to. Sometimes products and services fail because out of the whole world of people, you can reach enough of the right people to turn them into customers. And sometimes this is because you had …