What Is A Good Model For Marketing These Days?

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something – this side of it, if you like, doing interviews – is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project. – Rowan Atkinson

A few years ago content marketing was the thing – you were supposed to show what you knew and how you could help by sharing your knowledge and teaching others about a specific niche that you specialised in.

Focus. That was what mattered.

Are things any different now?

Probably not. If anything focus is even more important. Even if we don’t want it to be.

Let’s back up.

I heard a new term today – “content spam”.

That’s where people keep putting out content, bombarding you with it on the basis that some people will engage with it and some of those will commission work from you.

The model there is nothing new. It’s a numbers game. Put enough stuff out there and the law of large numbers says that someone will eventually want what you’re selling.

But there’s an investment of time that goes into doing this – you need to create and share material and it makes sense to do that about something very specific.

That’s because no one wants a generalist. They want someone with deep expertise in solving the particular problem they have.

Deep expertise and a strong track record is what you need to get over the trust barrier with a prospective client.

But the time you spend developing that expertise is time that you probably don’t spend marketing yourself.

Marketing has a cost. It’s either going to cost your time and money or it’s going to cost someone else’s time and money. The person with access to a market needs to get paid. You will always have a cost of customer acquisition.

There’s also the question of time. Sometimes you’re early to the party and it’s about being first to get a new customer. Sometimes you’re late and it’s about taking away a customer from someone else.

So what is good marketing now?

It’s whatever works to get you noticed by a prospective customer who then starts a conversation with you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh