Advertising
Permission Based Marketing – Seth Godin
I consider him a mentor because I feel his direction and guidance have helped me immensely in my business career. He keeps in contact with his readers through his popular blog found HERE .
Seth is a prolific writer and a creative genius when it comes to understanding human behavior in the context of online marketing psychology and how companies can be successful as they develop relationships with their customers.
He was a pioneer in the early days of the Internet, in my estimation, because he went where others had not gone and he talked about ways of doing business online that departed from the conventional and traditional thinking of the day.
One of his books, Permission Marketing, is a classic that all solo online business owners ought to study. The book is short (about 250 pages of easy reading) but it is one that you will come back to often for its insights and wisdom. Yes, it is dated in some ways now, but the lessons and ideas laid out about “permission marketing” are still appropriate today.
I keep his book on my desk rather than on the bookshelf because I refer to it often.
In this time of mega-spam and what Godin calls “interruption marketing,” he preaches that entrepreneurs should market in a way that customers will willingly accept the message.
Instead of interrupting the customer and wasting his time, Godin talks about offering targeted customers an incentive to accept advertising that will be anxiously received. By nurturing and “deepening” the relationship you create with strangers (prospects), you will turn them into friends and later into customers. Of course, after years of successful online marketing, companies are now following his advice as the accepted norm in online marketing.
Of particular interest to solo business owners is Chapter 8 “Everything You Know About Marketing on the Web Is Wrong!” and Chapter 9 “Permission Marketing in the Context of the Web.”
The conventional wisdom back in the day seemed to be that you treat the Internet as a “broadcast medium.” You shout your message as loudly as possible to the masses like a TV commercial aired on the Super Bowl.
This classic “interruption marketing” is causing companies to waste millions of dollars in time, capital, and energy because very few accept Internet marketing designed for the masses. They have learned to ignore spam and click away from messages they haven’t asked to receive.
Solo owners need to understand the benefits of direct marketing to a targeted audience and focus their efforts in building a permission based list of loyal customers. According to Godin, these benefits of Internet business include:
1. “Free stamps” meaning no cost to deliver direct email marketing.
2. The speed of testing your marketing is 100 times faster than offline.
3. Response rates are 15 times higher than traditional marketing.
4. You can implement what he calls “curriculum marketing” in both text and via web sites.
5. You can identify and talk with customers efficiently and often.
6. Printing is free.
This is just a quick sampling of some of the numerous and groundbreaking ideas about marketing online that Godin shares in his easy-to-digest style that makes reading his work, Permission Marketing, both fun and profitable.
I’ll share some personal thoughts about a few of his other great books in the future. Whatever you do, don’t miss the opportunity to get to know Seth Godin and learn from this master of Internet marketing.
To your online business success,
Steve Browne
www.SteveBrowneDirect.com