If you could give a person ONE tip in regards to marketing, what would it be? (And you can't use the same answer as someone else )
Marketing is helping people get what they want. Always remember...people want products or services that solve their problems
Marketing is about meeting people's needs and wants and at the same time making sure you are confident in delivering your product or service without turning their problem into an even bigger problem.
It's all in the product; if it's valuable to the customer and solves a problem, the marketing will be effective naturally.
I disagree. You can have a weak product and have the best marketing in the world and still make lots of money.
Well, everything starts with definitions. Otherwise you don't even have a subject. 1) Tip 1 - Make more money than you spend 2) Tip 2 - Make more money than you spend 3) Tip 3 - Survey for a need before you make a product 4) Tip 4 - Carry out your business ethically or you will crash quickly or slowly 5) Tip 5 - As soon as you increase your capital outsource where possible to leverage your effectiveness and time which is a valuable commodity 6) Tip 6 - Learn as you go - the most important commodity is actually you.
It is not about the product. In fact i can even go as far as saying that Internet Marketing is the Mastery of Selling Nothing. The basics of marketing is as follows: 1) Establish a sense of Need 2) Establish a sense of Urgency 3) Establish a feeling of missing out. These three things are huge psychological factors in sales and marketing.
As a marketing guy, here are two tips out of maybe dozens of possible tips: 1) Measure everything you do. Especially for smaller companies, and for b2b companies, marketing is usually not worth doing if you cannot measure the result (traffic, leads and sales). 2) Build something remarkable. The more "remarkable" the product or service you provide, the more likely people will tell others about it. (This is from Seth Godin, and he has a great perspective on a lot of marketing topics. You might want to read his blog at sethgodin.typepad.com/ - Mike
Do at least one thing for your marketing efforts every single day, whether it's investing a ton of time into a big campaign, or simply making a forum post where there's a link in your sig. And just in reference to some comments earlier in the thread... Not only can a terrible product have a great marketing campaign that makes it successful, but there are plenty of really great products that 99% of the population will never hear about, simply because the creator doesn't put in any effort marketing. There's nothing "natural" about marketing... PR, yes - a lot of that should be natural. But marketing involves planning, effort, time, and often money. You're either good at it, or you're not. Even the most natural form of marketing (word of mouth - really PR anyway... generating a "buzz") is a result of some kind of marketing effort. You can't be lax, and just hope the world finds out about you or your products. It will always involve effort on someone's part.
tip: choose only a hand full of methods and do them 100%, rather than 100 different methods only half way.
Not all of your marketing attempts will be successful, in fact, expect few to be a real splash! However, always ask yourself the reasons why your marketing method was not particularly successful, and how you can improve on it! NEVER STOP TRYING NEW METHODS!
Well said. For just two examples: MS-DOS was not a better product than Apple's OS or others in the field at the time, but Gates et al. were better marketers than anyone else and they took the early lead and kept it (they had vision, among other things). VHS was not a better format than BetaMax but Sony totally blew their marketing and in the end VHS won that war.