I watched a video on Facebook of two people with Down’s Syndrome talking about their relationship. What you see are two people who enjoy the feeling of love to the fullest, be it their love of dancing or going to the movies or just eating tasty things. What I took from the video was an appreciation of just how pure they were in their sentiment. There’s not a lot of trepidation with Down’s. You just go straight towards what you want. Marketing should be like that.
Marketing is simple. We mess it up.
The least interesting conversations I ever get in with people are about marketing. Why? Because people want to talk about funnels and mechanics and software and all the least fun parts.
The best parts of marketing are like love. You love what your company makes and you love how it helps people in some way and so you go out there and you find the people who need what you sell, and you help them decide.
That’s marketing. Create the marketplace and facilitate the sale. That’s it.
Marketing isn’t a spreadsheet. That’s just a tool. Marketing isn’t a specific sequence. That’s just a workflow. It’s what we cling to and tinker with when we don’t want to market. All that stuff is there because we think it’s what we need.
Elon Musk deleted the company Facebook pages.
He did. Tesla and SpaceX. Gone. He agreed with everyone that Facebook was too big for its britches and he didn’t want to play any more. Gone.
And so you see marketing people (especially social marketing people) losing their minds. I’ve seen mountains of posts and articles saying that this is a strange time for “social media managers” (whatever those are).
Musk sent a fricken car into outer space on a rocket ship his company built. He made millions of people stop and think and consider and reconnect with dreams long dormant about moving off this particular rock and checking out some nearby planets we might want to add to the collection.
He doesn’t need Facebook. He needs to show love.
Marketing isn’t any particular tool. It’s the connection.
You find people where they are in the checkpoints:
Awareness
Evaluation
Purchase
Onboarding
Retention/Referral
You help them by engaging with them and giving them what they need at those phases. You make a connection of some kind. And then you serve them in ways that make their world better.
That’s marketing. That’s love.
Engage. Connect. Serve.
It’s such a simple recipe that WE mess up.
Fire off your rockets into space. Take your love out dancing. Put your big juicy heart to work on reaching the people you need to serve.
Simple. (But not easy.)