Home-Made Marketing: Just Don’t Do It.

By nature entrepreneurs are a resourceful bunch. If they see a need, they fill it. If they see a problem, they try to solve it. Generally, it’s a good thing. Where it becomes problematic is with marketing their business. With few exceptions it can be an ineffective use of time and money. In some cases, it can be fatal.

Case in point — a business-owner doctor once hired us to help and then sat me down for about an hour telling me how clever he was at marketing. It was like someone showing me ugly pictures of their baby and bragging how cute he is. The doctor is now out of business. I did what I could to help, but it was a  case of “too little, too late.” He had blown so much money on his own unprofessional efforts, we couldn’t recoup from the damage. So, if your business is more sophisticated than a lemonade stand, it would be wise to get help.

How do you find it? One thing I suggest when seeking any kind of help is to 1) listen to what their clients say and 2) see how well that marketing expert markets themselves. So, check out their website, read their client testimonies, and see what kind of G-Cred they have. That will give you a good perspective on whether they are worthy to be hired.

BlogTalkRadio is the social media radio network that has included such guests as Arianna Huffington, Oliver Stone, Hillary Clinton, Brad Pitt, Maya Angelou, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, and Yoko Ono.

In this interview, John Follis discusses Follis Marketing Therapy and his book “How to Attract and Excite Prospects – A marketing guide to getting the best results.”

So, I was on the phone recently with yet another marketing expert promoting yet another marketing seminar. Considering that this expert’s website gave me a big ERROR message when I logged in I was extra curious to find out more about who this genius was. Ironically, her seminar was entitled: “How to Market Your Business.”

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Hear John Follis talk about the campaigns that built his award-winning ad agency and explain why most small business owners need therapy.

1) They don’t fully understand it.
Perception: Marketing is advertising.
Reality: Marketing may not even include advertising.
Perception: Marketing is an expense.
Reality: Done right, marketing your product is the best investment you can make.

2) They rely almost exclusively on Word-of-Mouth.
Even if you have great word-of-mouth you can’t afford to sit back and wait for customers. You must be proactive.

3) They think they can’t afford it.
This ties in with the perception/reality issue where people hear marketing and think traditional advertising that’s expensive and often ineffective. Effective marketing involves a smorgasbord of very cost-effective, non-traditional, creative options and executions.

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You’re bound to read plenty of articles about how to succeed this year. Some undoubtedly have great tips, but just as many have uninspired, absurdly upbeat ideas that you’ve read a hundred other times. So, I thought I’d mix it up a little with a primer on how to shoot yourself in the foot, create your own problems, and just plain screw up this year.

No, I don’t want you to follow my advice, but these not so gentle reminders will help you avoid some of the most common ways that so many of us fail. Enjoy! (more…)

Don’t trust any marketing firm or person that’s not great at marketing themselves.

I hear it all the friggin’ time: “Yeah, I know my (FILL IN WORD) sucks, but I guess it’s like the cobbler’s children with no shoes. Heh, heh.”

If a marketing “expert” has a lame web site, or a lame business card, or doesn’t carry a business card, or has @aol, @gmail, or @optonline as their email domain, or has no blog, or doesn’t really know what a blog is, or what “Web 2.0″ means, and isn’t on Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, and has no G-Cred, then he or she should not be calling themselves a marketing expert and have no right to be advising you on your business.

It’s the tagline that defined the Obama campaign –  the most successful in American political history.

So, what about your business, product or organization? Does it have a strong, clear, and positive identity? Are your prospects really clear about what your product or service is and how it benefits them? Are you exciting your prospects with your message? If you’re not sure, chances are you’d benefit from a great tagline.

Here are some other effective tagline examples: http://www.follisinc.com/tagline.htm