What is Marketing?

“Hello!!! I made a thing!” I yelled to my empty office. Is that marketing? Well there’s STILL nobody who knows about my project so I guess not. Oof marketing!

I feel like I’ve done this thousands of times — built a thing and then been unable to promote it.

For me building is easy, (check out my robotic teddy bear project video!) but telling people about my projects is hard.

The other day I was thinking about this marketing puzzle and realized. I don’t really know what marketing is, so I thought I’d do a bit or research and write a blog post about the topic.

Marketing is…

Marketing is figuring out how to craft a message about what you can help people with, get it in front of relevant people, and convince them to try out your solution.

You can break marketing down into 3 main parts:

• Core message - we solve xyz problem
• Channels - how you reach people (Facebook, Google, in person events etc…)
• Tactics - promotion techniques (Giveaways, chatbots, popups, etc…)

Start with the core message

Without the core message there’s nothing to promote and making decisions about the core message impact decisions about channels and tactics.

I found a great book (Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller) and he builds a core message by building a 1-line positioning summary in the format of problem - solution - outcome.

entrepreneurs don’t know how to market (problem) we have a blog (solution) that helps entrepreneurs learn about marketing (result)

This 1-line positioning statement (which you could casually rattle off at a cocktail party) gets turned into a landing page, lead magnet, email sequence etc…

Another book (Simple Marketing for Smart People by Billy Boras) builds marketing messages around “what would a prospect need to believe in order to become a customer?“.

These beliefs get turned into blog posts, social media campaigns, etc…

Channels

Channels are the ways you can reach customers with messages.

I’ve gotten stuck in the past when I tried to start with channels… “I know, I’ll just start posting random stuff to Instagram” never works. The right channel will depend on who the customer is and what the problem being solved is.

If you do have a core message figured out then that should help you a lot in determining where to advertise.

For example if I’m trying to help parents I could find a local parents’ group or school, or if I’m trying to provide a new landing page builder I could advertise on Google.

I’ll probably post more about specific channel tests later as I do more of them.

Tactics

These can safely be ignored at this point. They’re optimizations that boost a campaign that’s already working.

Here’s a nifty way to remember it ~ the river analogy

Core message is the furthest upstream and is most important. Spend the most time on this. Start simple with something you could say on an elevator or put in your email footer.

There are millions of potential channels that represent the mid-stream. You’ll need SOME channels in order to succeed. The best ones will be ones that are easy to access and fit your core message. You might need to do a bunch of little experiments to figure out which channels work. You can post content that helps people learn the things they need believe in order to become customers.

Tactics are way downstream and so they’re distracting and not that important in the beginning. Focus on getting a solid core message and a channel or two and visit this later.

My Plan

I plan to launch some marketing experiments in the next few months. I’ll post updates here so stay tuned. Thanks for reading!