Great marketing is about patience and creativity

Let's not confuse marketing genius with spending a bunch of money on advertising. Spending money can make you appear to have marketing skills, you can buy ads and get on the top of search engines, but its a false sense of cool. Who clicks on banner ads anyways? We (Less Everything) could hire a couple folks to go to conferences talk to people pass out schwag and shmooze popular bloggers. But isn't that just creating the fake sense of cool? Instead of searching for the next great colorful piece of schwag, why not spend that effort and pour it into the product, the service and kindness of your company. Marketing is about getting the word out and buying ad space is the easy choice, attending SXSW and giving out buttons is the obvious path for marketing. It's easier to throw money at it than chip away at the market. Great marketing is about patience and creativity.

Personal Examples... We're receiving thousands of LessAccounting.com signups from WeAllHateQuickbooks.com. But we saw very little returns from a banner ads on major css design directories. We received a ton of traffic for releasing LessFriends.com and very little for ranking highly for "Small Business Accounting Software".

• Releasing Rails like 37Signals did is marketing genius.
• When Seth Godin posts amazing articles daily to his blog, that's great marketing.
• When you return a pair of shoes to Zappos and they make the process so easy, that's great marketing.
• When you call Wesabe.com, and speak to the CEO, Marc Hedlund, that's great marketing.
• When you tweet about Comcast Cable they answer your tweet and help resolve the situation that's good marketing.
• When you get your wisdom teeth out and the next day the oral surgeon calls you to check up to see how you're doing. That's great marketing.

Everything you do is marketing, how fast you return emails. Do you deliver your projects on time. Do your clients feel you care about their best interest. It's all marketing and less about cool schwag, shaking hands and meta-tag keywords. Give me 10,000 people subscribing to our blog over a #1 keyword ranking for "Ruby on Rails Developers" any day (we're actually #5).

1 Comment

Ted Pearlman said on February 22, 2009

It’s always a great comfort to know their are companies out there who really do understand marketing. I wrote an article about this a ways back. Clearly, you and I have both had encounters with the dental chair that are still with us.