Marketing isn’t creating content.
Marketing isn’t building a community.
Marketing isn’t creating brand collateral, or sales enablement.
Marketing IS finding out where your market/buyers are, and building trust with them.
Those things mentioned? They’re tactics.
You create content to help *build an audience* (not subscribers, not followers, *an audience*).
You create funnels, content, and retargeting campaigns to help nudge them along the customer journey (also known as the customer experience, or from awareness to hand raisers to purchase).
You use messaging (fancy word for *copy*) to align your brand with the audience persona.
You build a community to, again, create *an audience*. Taylor Swift doesn’t have followers. She doesn’t have a community. She has a *loyal audience*.
But these are just tactics. Taylor Swift couldn’t have the loyal following she does, if her music didn’t speak so deeply to her fans.
In my experience, the more people focus on tactics, the less they understand how marketing actually works. Just like in Physics: if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it.
Tactics are important. The right tactic, with the right market, and the right positioning, will skyrocket your results.
And iteration is important in figuring this out. What worked for someone else, will probably not work for you. (Despite all the gurus bombarding me with adverts promise).
Finally, reputation. An underrated thing in online marketing, because of our focus on short term results.
If you have a reputation for creating high quality, scarcely published stuff, and you suddenly are releasing low quality, high volume stuff: your reputation will suffer.
If you have a reputation for being an authoritative brand that lets the product/service speak for itself, and you start using faces in your marketing, because the algorithms favour it… your reputation will suffer.
You’re in the business of building an audience. Long term compounding is your friend. Every person you add to your audience can potentially add three to seven people down the line. But they will only do that if they trust you.
2025 is going to be the year businesses with a long term focus in their marketing will win. Why?
Because of the increase of automated generative AI crap.
In the 1900s yellow page journalism was the rage. This was where to make sales, you’d print more and more outrageous headlines. This is the image of the boy on the street yelling “extra, extra!” while trying to sell papers.
These fake news headlines sparked the Spanish American war. In the aftermath people wanted quality news. Two newspapers went door to door selling monthly subscriptions.
The New York Times and the Washington Post ended the era of yellow page journalism, and built the idea of the fourth estate.
Because when there’s a quantity of crap, people will desire quality.
Oh, an maybe throw a typo into your copy every now and then, so people know it wasn’t written by AI.
This was originally posted on my LinkedIn.