What Does an Internet Marketer Do?
It’s All About Building Influence
One thing you will learn about me, I like simple answers. I think the most complex problems are solved by the easy answer, so here goes. An Internet Marketer uses the Internet to influence people’s decisions to do things.
Notice I didn’t say “buy stuff.” There’s a reason for that. If you are an Internet Marketer for a not-for-profit trying to get awareness of an issue, or an Internet Marketer for a political candidate trying to get votes, or an Internet Marketer for a company trying to build brand awareness (the list could go on) you are not necessarily “selling” a product, rather you are trying to influence opinion.
By influencing opinion you can do anything.
Now Wikipedia and other sites will give you laundry lists of the things that Internet Marketers do. If you are interested in that click the link above. At the end of the day, however, Internet Marketing is really about getting people interested in what you are doing online. If you want to know what great marketers do, read on.
What Great Marketers Do.
Seth Godin is a great marketer. He has written a dozen best-selling books on marketing including the bluntly titled “All Marketers Are Liars” (Seth recently re-released this book with the work “Liars” crossed out, and the words “Story Tellers” written in). In a 2005 article Seth wrote his own laundry list of what every good marketer knows. He said things like:
- Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
- AMaking promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
- Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
- Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market. Marketing begins before the product is created.
- Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
- Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency
These points are just a sample from the list, and Godin gives some very sound advice. There are three points from his list that should serve as guideposts for anyone looking to do great marketing, especially in the realm of social media.
Great Marketing Encourages the Right Sort of Conversations
“Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.”
You cannot stop people from talking, especially today. The marketers job is to listen to these conversations and then encourage a dialogue, not a monologue (that’s old world marketing). If you can get customers talking, you can both learn from and influence them.
You do not want to be the marketer who believes the lie that people will buy what you are selling because of some intrinsic greatness your product possesses. People will buy what they want and you are not in charge of that (another gem from Godin’s list: “your prospects don’t care about you”).
Rather then convincing them and then getting frustrated with a market that just doesn’t “get it” find a way to connect to your customer by offering that little something “extra” that creates an “emotional bonus.” This is the magic part of the marketers job, and your best tools to make it happen are stories.
Good Marketers Tell a Story
“People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants. Good marketers tell a story.”
Basic human wants can be broken down into two major categories: The desire for gain and the desire to avoid loss. All fears are a manifestation of one of these two desires (fear of not getting or fear of losing).
In 1943, behavioral psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation” where he proposed a hierarchy of needs that places human motivation into five-tiers of importance.
These motivations can be diagrammed as a pyramid, with the simplest and most common motivations comprising the base and higher, more esoteric motivations the top. Here are Maslows hierarchy of needs listed out for you with number 1 comprising the base of the pyramid and number 5 the top:
- Physiological – food, water, sleep, breathing, sex, homeostasis
- Safety – security of body, employment, resources, family, health, property, morality
- Love/belonging – friendship, family, sexual intimacy
- Esteem – self esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others
- Self actualization – morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts
Maslow’s theory provides a framework for marketers to do their jobs and tell stories that matter to their customers. Marketing stories should be crafted to tap into different levels of the motivational pyramid. The higher up your message appeals the greater emotional connection you can create. Tapping into the human wants and needs through great storytelling moves marketing out of the realm of sleazy convincing and hustling and into the realm of psychological and emotional engagement.
One caveat.
Your stories should always be focused telling the customer how their lives can be better because of what you are marketing, not how great your product, idea or charity is. Think of it like dating: you wouldn’t want to go on a second date with someone who sat at dinner the entire time talking about how great they are. Most of us want to engage with people who want to know about us, ask questions and listen.
Why should marketing be any different?
Great marketers know this and spend their time identifying the right audience for their product, developing a message that will communicate and resonate with that audience and creating the best experience for people who choose to pay attention.
A.M.P. Up Your Marketing to Match Your Customers Worldview
“Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.”
We’ve spoken about the importance of marketing to your audience and the wants rather than just proclaiming the greatness of your products. Crafting a marketing story that matches your customers worldview means going the extra mile to know and connect with your customer.
Think of ways to “A.M.P.” up your marketing. When you “amp” anything up it means putting real power into it – in marketing terms it stands for the following:
- A – audience. Every marketing effort must start here by identifying, understanding and knowing how to reach the core audience.
- M – message. Develop marketing messages that will resonate with your audience based your experience with them and what you know to be true for them. Here is where great storytelling makes all the difference.
- P – product. Notice this comes last in the formula. Unfortunately too many companies put their products first and then try to wedge the audience in through marketing. The product is the answer to the problems presented in the story.
You need a great product experience for the preceding items to have a lasting and repeated effect. Godin says that “living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in a conversation-rich world.” That means you should adopt the no-bullshit policy.
Strip out jargon and corporate speak from your marketing materials. Stop pretending to be the infallible, all knowing, wonderful wizard of Oz (he was just a lost guy behind a curtain after all). Get to know your customer and then build a marketing dialogue that feels like a real relationship (if your company is small enough or savvy enough you should be building actual relationships!). Just remember, the story always goes back to your customer and their experience.
Influencing your customer does not mean lying to them or telling them what they want to hear. Influence means finding the right customer, the one who can most benefit from what you have to offer, and making them care deeply about what you have to offer, so much so they are moved to act.
Bottom line: tell a compelling story and keep it real.
Very interesting article. I believe most of us Internet Marketers are most concerned about selling rather than connecting with potential customers.
Kevin:
I think that is the main problem with most Internet Marketers: they just want to sell.
It’s like being that sleazy guy on a date who just wants to get in the girl’s pants – that guy will never develop a real connection to that girl that pays off in the long run. And guess what? Most customers can sense when a Marketer just wants to get into their wallets. It’s a turn off and a reason why Internet Marketing tends to be viewed as the practice of spamming people, putting pop ups on websites and demanding money. We’re about 1-step above lawyers (and I can say this b/c I am a lawyer too)!
Gary Vaynerchuk said it best. He sums up the only Internet Marketing strategy you will EVER need to be wildly successful. Ready for it … care. That’s it. Care about your customers. Care about what they need and creating that Decision Simplicity that makes it so obvious your product is what they need. And if your product isn’t what they need don’t try to convince them with cheap tactics.
At the end of the day, brilliant marketing combines all the skills of the Internet (research, targeting, analytics, SEO, copywriting, and community building), creativity in campaigns and how to reach your masses, but most of all a genuine approach to connecting buyer to product.
I remember frequently, my Grandfather, he would tell shaggy dog stories that keep peoples interest for sometimes up to one half an hour… now there was a real marketer!
Eric,
Stories sell. It’s one of the primary ways I think any marketer can connect to customers and make an impact. Not sure if you watch Mad Men (if not you should – it’s awesome), but there is a great episode where Don Draper (the head of creative at the ad agency) is pitching the people from Poloroid. It’s 1963 and they just developed a new piece of technology to show slides from a projector. Up until then you had to insert each slide. Now they developed something they were calling “the wheel.” Don gave a presentation, using “the wheel” filled with slides of his family growing up. He tells them a story about how the years go on, but this piece of technology is like a time machine letting you relive all these wonderful memories. He then says it’s like a ride through time and “It’s not a ‘wheel’ … it’s a carousel.” The story sold that project.
I believe most of us Internet Marketers are most he would tell shaggy dog stories that keep peoples interest for sometimes up to one half an hour….
This article really changed my perspective on Internet Marketing! Thank you very much!
Glad to help David. I’d be happy to hear about what you do differently in the future.
Very useful points. Marketers tend to forget they’re dealing with human beings. It is essential to connect to the person, find out what drives them, what they need, and only then offer the solution.
Tobias,
The challenge I have found is that when you market a product you have to start with the product you have. So few product developers take a “market first approach” in developing what they want to sell. So always you are involved in this balancing act between needing to market the product you have and find the audience that’s best for it. The perfect scenario is when product dev comes to you first when they want to create a new product, you take their idea and research it, then report findings to help them develop the end result. Then when it is time to go to market with that you’ve got a built in audience for what you want to sell (provided your product guys executed well of course!).
Its so important to speak to peoples emotional side when we are marketing rather than, like you say, telling them how great our product is. Yes it needs to be a great product but people will make their final decission not on what widgets it has but on how it will make them emotionally feel.
Thanks for the grast post, Nick
Nick,
That’s a perceptive comment: nothing can compete with an emotional connection. It’s why people are nuts about Apple – yes they have great products, but there is an emotional connection most of us make to the company through their products. We join their “club” and become loyal to them, talking it up to our friends and using our iPads with pride. All that comes from marketing – from the way the product is packaged to the ads on TV, the Keynote speeches to the minimalist homepages with awesome tag lines.
Excellent article
Agree that most online marketers now into selling. When you are venturing into internet marketing, the first reason should be because you want to share ideas and information that will get the people to know you.
Amber: IMO a marketers’ job is to influence. “Sharing ideas and information” to give people an idea of who you are falls under Personal Branding. These are not semantics.
Personal Branding is super important for everyone b/c it is how you build a solid presence on the web. Check out this post I did for more on that http://mymedialabs.com/2012/03/23/marketing-yourself-in-three-steps-the-pillars-of-personal-branding/.
Ultimately, the best marketers are willing to share pieces of themselves to influence their market. This is not, however, a requirement.
I write articles for a blog linked to my site and I find that the title is what makes the biggest difference. If a title is not catchy or appealing then visitors will often overlook the content of a marketing article.
Amen Brother!
Headlines are SUPER IMPORTANT. Great headlines balance out the needs to be informative, catchy and SEO optimized.
Be on the lookout for some headline posts coming from my blog soon!
Yes Mike, I agree to you that influence can do great things as online marketing continue to evolve.
A couple of years ago, I worked as an influencer online *defensive glare* no that’s not the same as spamming! We had strict guidelines; keep it relevant, keep it factual, be of assistance, engage with others, DO NOT spam, be honest about pros and cons and then of course, try to drop a link ;). That was in a time when comments were based on articles on the web. Twitter, facebook and even to a certain degree YouTube didn’t really feature in the marketing ploy. While the basic idea seems to remain the same (focus on the consumer’s needs) the scope has become so much larger!
The funny thing is, having spent years doing this day in and day out, now that I’m in the position to be starting my own business, I would far rather focus on what I do best and leave the conversations, tweeting, facing and tubing (yes, all those time consuming things) to a company like Brandvocates that specialises in this kind of work. The benefits of using a company, is that they will want to keep you as a client, resulting in quality, have a name to uphold and are experienced in what they do. The onus is just on you to follow up from time to time and see that your values are being upheld.
Great read…brings back many memories!
Cheryl: this is definitely one approach you can take. The drawback of using a company to lead your online engagement is you lose the direct connection with the customer and your business. Depending on how close the relationship is with your hired gun, this arrangement can work out well. At the end of the day, whether you outsource or DIY your marketing engagement you need to make sure that all activities are ultimately in the customers’ best interest and that you are serving their needs by being responsive.
Great article Mike! I would like to ask you how good will it be approaching ones first time customers through emails? Can emails be treated as a medium to tell a story & engage them to our product? Thanks in advance!
Thanks for the feedback Kumar.
The trouble with email is we used to all be nuts about it, now they hate it. Remember back in the late ’90′s, AOL “You’ve Got Mail” (they made a movie about it) – people used to be excited when they got new messages in their Inbox. Today, new email is a chore, and not one that most people get excited about, except in certain cases.
If someone has opted into your email list b/c they love your content or product that is a different story. When they opt in, your customers have given you permission to market to them over time. This means you better be delivering an email marketing experience that is totally focused on providing your customers with valuable content that helps them solve their real world challenges whether they decide to buy something from you or not (your product should then make solving those challenges THAT much easier).
From your question, however, it sounds like you are asking about making the first connection through email. Tread carefully here Kumar. Chances are a blind email campaign to first time customers who did not opt in to your list will come off as spam. Yes – you can use email to engage and tell a story, but the people on the receiving end must care deeply about that story and want to engage with you (for more on engagement, check out my post on Legos and Decision Simplicity http://www.business2community.com/marketing/lessons-from-legos-creating-engagement-with-decision-simplicity-0218629).
Hi Mike, this is a great article! I’m a coach who’s studies NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and one thing that really works to influence is by telling a story, which is what Eric’s grandfather used to do (and why Eric remembers it so vividly). Internet Marketing is definitely about SOLVING your customers problems as opposed to pushing your product on them. Keep the great articles coming! Meg.
Storyelling is huge. It’s is one fo the oldest forms of effective marketing. There is a reason that so many successful sales letters and sales pages use the storytelling format.
You’re right on the money with AMP. Too many companies do it in the reverse, and wonder why their message has gone missing. It’s because they never take the time to truly understand ther audience and their needs,before they ever get to he product.
Thanks for the feedback Steve. I totally agree that too many companies focus on product first. The mistake that happens is they fall in love with themeselves. Marketing is a relationship with the customer. If your relationship involves only one person than we all know what that is … :-)
In today`s world most of the concern running with internet marketing..but most of the consumer never fully understant the demand of audience its a real fact..on that situation occur only the dissatisfactions to the customer…nice concept keep going…..