The Marketing Book 2019
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THE MARKETING BOOK by Jason McDonald, Ph.D. © 2019, JM Internet Group https://www.jm-seo.org/ All Rights Reserved 1 | The Marketing Book Who say to the seers, “You must not see visions”; And to the prophets, “You must not prophesy to us what is right, Speak to us pleasant words, Prophesy illusions. Isaiah 30:10 For Ava & Hannah 2 | The Marketing Book TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Introduction I. DEFINE WHAT YOU SELL, THAT THEY WANT 1. What You Have, That They Want 2. Market Research or Marketing Research? 3. The Product / Service Matrix 4. B2B B2G B2C 5. Buyer Personas 6. Positioning: Find Your Niche 7. Twaggle: Your BVP as Blueprint II. BUILD YOUR BRAND 8. Brand Identity, Branding, & Brand Equity 9. Promote It: The Marketing Mix, the Promotion Mix 10. The Customer Strikes Back: Reputation Management 11. Twaggle: Branding along the Customer Journey III. MAKE YOURSELF EASY TO FIND 12. The Five Discovery Paths 13. Search: Can They Find You? 14. Review / Trust: Do They Trust You? 15. eWOM / Share / Influencers: Will They Talk About You? 16. Interrupt / Advertise: This Could be Annoying (& Might Just Work) 3 | The Marketing Book 17. Browse: The Power of Next To 18. Twaggle: Discover Your Discovery Paths IV. CREATE COMPELLING CONTENT 19. What is Content Marketing? 20. Persuade into the Predictably Irrational 21. Content along the Discovery Paths 22. The Medium is the Message 23. Twaggle: the Twaggle of Content V. THINK AND DEPLOY 24. Search Engines: SEO and AdWords 25. Understanding Social Media Marketing 26. Remarketing: Hello, Hello, Hello Advertising 27. Word of Mouth, eWOM, and Influencer Marketing 28. Email Marketing: the Rodney Dangerfield of Digital 29. Personal Selling – Real to Digital & Back Again 30. Tradition: Traditional Media & The Digital Reality 31. Twaggle: Fish Where the Fish Are TWAGGLE Twaggle: Build a Marketing Plan that Works 4 | The Marketing Book 5 | The Marketing Book INTRODUCTION Welcome to The Marketing Book, 2019 edition! My name is Jason McDonald, and I’m excited to be your guide to the fun-filled and enriching task of business marketing. This is a book about better thinking, better doing, and better measuring when it comes to marketing your business. This book will lead you step-by-step to a practical marketing plan for your business, both online and off. Let’s begin at the beginning. So let me give you a practical definition of marketing: Marketing is the effort to create a positive environment or “brand” around your product or service, so that you sell more stuff, and make more money. This is a book about better marketing, about how to “build your brand” and “sell more stuff.” There’s a lot to marketing. A lot of thinking, and a lot of doing, and quite a bit of measuring as to whether what you’re doing is working (that is - building your brand, selling more stuff), or not. It’s harder than it looks, and so this book breaks marketing down into five key activities: 1. Define what you sell, that they want. 2. Build your brand. 3. Make yourself easy-to-find. 4. Create compelling content. 5. Think and deploy; that is, promote your brand across digital and non-digital channels. These five key activities are explained in the five sections of this book. There’s also an important sixth concept, the concept of twaggle. Twaggle is a new word based on “toggle” (to move between activities) and action (to take action, to do something). Twaggle means that you have to have the “concept” in your head (such as knowing your brand identity) while simultaneously going out into the “real world” (such as talking with a customer face-to-face and explaining your brand to him). Twaggle 6 | The Marketing Book means theory and practice, practice and theory, concept and action, thinking and doing, doing and thinking, measuring and learning… all at the same time. So throughout the book, I will encourage you to “twaggle,” to take what you’ve learned and go do it, and then measure what you’re doing that’s working (and what’s not) and revise your ideas. By the end of the book, you will have the knowledge you need to create a marketing plan for your business that will translate better thinking into better doing, and better doing into better measuring so that you continually improve as a marketer and sell more stuff, more efficiently. Think / Do / Measure This book teaches the think / do / measure method of marketing. Each Chapter teaches a marketing task by, first, explaining how to think about the concept, second, giving you specific to-dos to actually go do it, and third, providing tips on how to measure what’s working (and what’s not) to do it better over time. Throughout the book, we’ll use the example of Jason’s Cat Boarding Emporium (JCBE), a fictitious business in San Francisco, California, that boards cats for people who are leaving the city on vacation, and also offers cat grooming services as well as cat toys and paraphernalia for purchase online. As the pretend marketing manager of JCBE, we’ll brainstorm ways to better market our products and services to affluent, busy San Franciscans who want to get out of town and have a place to stash the cat. With the framework of think / do / measure in your head, and with the miracle of the Internet at your fingertips, you can dive deeper into any marketing task and become a better marketer. “Once you know the question,” I often tell my students at Stanford Continuing Studies, “You can find the answer.” Let me repeat that: Once you know the question, you can find the answer. The framework of think / do / measure helps you twaggle your way to better questions, better answers, and better marketing. Who is This Book For? This book is for small business owners and marketers. If you own a small business and want to market it better, this book is for you. If you work for a small business as the marketing manager, this book is also for you. And if you are a jack of all trades person, 7 | The Marketing Book like the guy or gal that does both sales and marketing, this book is for you. If you are anyone who wants a practical tutorial on marketing, this is for you. This book is decidedly not an academic treatise on marketing. It’s a down-in-the-trenches practical manual on how to build your brand, and sell more stuff. This book is for people who have a pizza restaurant, and need to build out a Facebook page, and actually use it to increase pizza sales. It’s for the marketing managers at dentists or orthodontists, who need to encourage reviews on Google, Facebook, and Yelp, because they realize that today’s customers rely on online reviews. It’s for marketing managers at law firms and accounting firms, who need to market lawyers or accountants better, both online and off. It’s for the startup in St. Louis that has an idea for the next great app, but that needs to, first, write a very specific Business Value Proposition that translates the inspiration of this great idea into the perspiration of a step-by-step marketing plan, including figuring out what the best customer segments are. This book is for anyone who first heard the word, twaggle, and thought, if only for a moment, “Hey, that’s what I need. A guide to marketing that teaches me how to think clearly about marketing my business, how to do practical things to create a positive brand, and how to measure, continually, to get better at it.” It’s for people who don’t want to just “think” marketing but also want to “do” marketing and “measure” whether all this marketing effort is making them more money. Register Your Book Register your book by going to JMLINKS.com at http://jmlinks.com/ and entering the passcode, “twaggle2019.” By registering, you’ll get a PDF of the book, plus access to supplementary resources, including a template for creating your own marketing plan. Throughout the book, I reference any external web resources using the website JMLINKS.com. Visit that website, and enter any referenced code in the book, as for example, if I reference http://jmlinks.com/23a, then go to JMLINKS.com and enter “23a” to get to that resource. Got questions? Simply send me a question at http://jmlinks.com/contact, call 800- 298-4065, or just Google “Jason McDonald” to visit my website at https://www.jasonmcdonald.org, and ask me anything. I love questions, so don’t be shy! Acknowledgments Like any good author, I owe debts to many people. Like my Mom and Dad who first gave me a passion to learn. Or to my first boss, Joe Warin, at Kutak, Rock & Campbell of 8 | The Marketing Book Washington, D.C., who taught me that doing business is about helping people and having fun. Or to my wife, Noelle Decambra, who puts up with me and tells me when it’s better to put up and shut up. Or to my two kids, Ava and Hannah, who both know more about Snapchat than I ever could. Especially to Hannah, who helped me tremendously with the audio conversion. Or to Gloria McNabb who tirelessly helps me at the JM Internet Group, or to my dog, Buddy, who walks me every day (sometimes he walks me twice a day), plays ball with me and keeps me from getting heart disease at my computer.