This is Marketing – Notes 2

Notes and Excerpts from ‘This is Marketing’ by Seth Godin.

Our calling is to make a difference. A chance to make things better for those we seek to serve.

Writing books or creation of anything else for that matter whether video courses, training, cartoons, Youtube videos, podcasts, is a commodity. You can’t claim to be anywhere close to the best at it or even better than anyone else at it.

The alternative is to find and build and earn your story, the arc of the change you seek to produce. This is a generative posture, one based on possibility, not scarcity.

Your best customers become your new salespeople.

For the independent creator of intellectual property (a singer, perhaps, or a writer), it turns out that a thousand true fans might be sufficient to live a better-than-decent life.

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.

The challenge for most people who seek to make an impact isn’t winning over the mass market. It’s the micro market. They bend themselves into a pretzel trying to please the anonymous masses before they have fifty or one hundred people who would miss them if they were gone.

The smallest viable market makes sense because it maximizes your chances of changing a culture. The core of your market, enriched and connected by the change you seek to make, organically shares the word with the next layer of the market. And so on. This is people like us.

Focus all our energy on this group. Ignore everyone else. Instead, focus on building and living a story that will resonate with the culture we are seeking to change.

Enrollment is what you need to earn permission to engage.

Advertising is unearned media. It’s bought and paid for. And the people you seek to reach know it. They’re suspicious. They’re inundated. They’re exhausted.

There are two key things to keep in mind about pricing: Marketing changes your pricing. Pricing changes your marketing.

Better to apologize for the price once than to have to excuse a hundred small slights again and again. Price is a signal.

The rational thing is to believe that we’re more likely to require trust before we engage in risky transactions.

Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went.

Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman.

If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, that’s because it does. That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

How many people would reach out and wonder (or complain) if you didn’t send out that next email blast? That’s a metric worth measuring and increasing.

If permission is at the heart of your work, earn it and keep it. Communicate only with those who choose to hear from you. The simplest definition of permission is the people who would miss you if you didn’t reach out.

It’s worth noting that whether something is remarkable isn’t up to you, the creator. You can do your best, but the final decision is up to your user, not you. If they remark on it, then it’s remarkable. If they remark on it, the word spreads.

As people work their way through the funnel—from stranger to friend, friend to customer, customer to loyal customer—the status of their trust changes.

These huge marketplaces (Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, etc.) depend on the misguided hopes and dreams of individuals way out on the long tail. Separately, each one struggles. Taken together, it’s a good business.

The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat. Let someone else race around after shiny objects.

The method isn’t to go out and find an agent. The method is to do work so impossibly magical that agents and producers come looking for you.

If creating is the point, if writing and painting and building are so fun, why do we even care if we’re found, recognized, published, broadcast, or otherwise commercialized? Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.

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