POWER OF FREE! #10: Do You Have Permission in Intelligent Content Marketing: 7 Musings

Believe that I’ve got all the answers, I can assure you. But I’ve kind of thought about this. I’m kind of coming to sort of the following observations. And I’ll throw these out there for you. And I stand ready to have a discussion with you to see if there’s any Americans.

So this is what I think is going on. I think, firstly, the reason why people are engaging in tried and tested stuff that doesn’t work by interruption marketing, is that you’re new to business. Because you’re new to business, you really don’t have any experience about how business really works. Or if you’re new to business, what you’re doing is you’re sort of, you know, taking directions in your cues from other people that are doing things that are kind of classically stated interruption marketing. And you don’t really have any clue as to where and all this stuff is going to work until after you’ve done it.

But how many of you started businesses, and then engage in all the classic, you know, marketing techniques that you think are going to work because it appears that’s what everybody else is doing? And really got no results out of them whatsoever. So I think this is why if you’re new to business, you really need a good mentor, but you need a mentor, who’s done it, who’s experienced, who’s been successful. There’s no point in having a mentor, who hasn’t been successful in business and successful in modern business, not the old way of doing things. So I think this is one reason potentially why people engage and continue to engage. I think the second reason is that you hear so much stuff, you got absolutely no idea who you’re supposed to believe or what you’re supposed to believe, or gurus around every corner I, myself included, I suppose. But how do you know what to believe?

I think the maxim that those who do, so those who can do, those who can’t teach is really quite relevant as well here. I don’t want to disparage anybody that stands up and shares the benefits of their experience with other people, because that’s what I’m doing as well. But I do think that, you know, you have to kind of observe quite closely the pedigree of those people who are extensively directing your thoughts, to engage in marketing, so to speak in a particular way? And then ask you, well, if they’re teaching me, why aren’t they doing it? Now, I prefer not to classify myself as what I’m doing is teaching. Today, what I’m doing is I’m kind of reporting to you what I’ve done.

Therefore, you can at least learn from my example, given the amount of transparency, what’s actually going on in our business. But I do think, you know, you really need to be a bit circumspect about the kind of lessons that you’re learning from people whose job is to teach, is to give. I think another problem that explains why interruption marketing continues on is that people tend to think that all these discrete approaches to marketing, your product and service, or these tactics collectively represent a strategy. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think you need to found a strategy on something more profound. As we’ve done in our business, as you’ll see, the strategy that we have gotten has essentially been to parlay our expertise and help people by answering their questions and helping to solve their problems. And then the issue of marketing then falls away, because everyone in this room tonight, I’ve got your permission, right? You’re here, I’ve emailed you.

If you see my email, I have your permission to invite you to proceeding must not a tactic. This is the fundamental point of a permission marketing strategy. And I think this is probably a really, really big reason why people do it. And that is they are lazy marketeers. And what they do normally, as they say, right, well, I’ve got this great idea. So I’m going to spend all my time initially manifesting my idea into a product or a service. And then once I’ve got my product or my service all ready to sell. I’m now going to now now going to take my product or my service out to market and I’m going to try and sell it and this approach means essentially what you do As you engage in tactical marketing, because you look at all the different formulas that you can use to take your product or service to market, and then you start engaging, essentially interruption marketing. Whereas if you have built your product and your service from the get go anticipating that you’re not going to like it, that your product is going to have intrinsic attraction to the people who are necessarily going to be wanting or needing. so lazy marketing is a crime, total fair minded America.

Another issue that I suspect might be in play here is that, you know, the whole startup community, sort of five years old now, I guess, is engaging in this huge hoo ha, about how profoundly brilliance it is to be a startup, and to be a startup venture for now. So people spend an awful amount of time on startup activities that actually don’t really deliver much value. Things like you know, pitches, practicing your pitches, competitions. From all the startup entrepreneurs that I know, that have kind of pushed through the successful, I can’t remember a single one of them who said to us, you know what, you know, that’s 5000, the Hong Kong dollar prize in that competition for more sophisticated Apple, whatever, that didn’t directly lead to us in any meaningful sense of the success that we went towards.

A similar the whole idea of, you know, pitching on trends and pitching here and pitching there and just doing stuff is entertaining for startups, but actually takes you off the main goal. And main goal is to develop a product or service that people really want them to have in viewed inside of your product or service, a natural route for people to find it, and for people to want it. That’s the main challenge. So the whole idea of startup entertainment, I think is something of a red herring. it discourages ultimately joined up thinking because, you know, if you’re a startup and you’re seeking to, you know, take advantage of your entrepreneurial seizure, when you’re not stupid, right, what you do is you go and find kind of all the best in class thinking that’s out there and find those people who are in your niche or doing things the way that you would like to people that you respect or all this kind of stuff.

I think it’s time best spent on working more properly, from the get go and the business model. I think another problem is that the startup community is focused on getting an MVP, and then so called growth hacking your way to success. Now, I’ve got the utmost respect for Eric race. I think what he has done with startup, the Lean Startup has formulated Finally, an approach to thinking about a business model, you know, experience. I think it’s a fantastic piece of work. But the issue is, what’s missing, in my view, this idea that it’s not enough just to get a product, a minimum viable product, to take it to market. You’ve got to understand the core reality of why people might want to buy that from you and factor that into every facet of your efforts to take it to market.

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