Marketing Blog from MyTypes.com

Marketing, Motivation and Inspiration

True inspiration comes from a deep burning desire to solve a large problem to help the world, your family, your friends, or humanity. There has to be a deeper meaning for inspiration, but for motivation things don’t have to have a deep or large goal. Motivation can come from any desire to achieve a goal. We are all motivated by different things, at different moments in our lives. Anthony Robbins mentions that pain is a better motivator than pleasure, and provides enough proof of his beliefs. I am sure that can be the case for immediate action, but for sustainable long term goals, inspiration and spiritual meaning is where our burning desire has to come from. In our book Marketing and Motivation, we try to provide the tools for Motivation and success laws. But, most importantly, we try to provide real world marketing strategies and techniques to help you promote yourself and your business.

Chapter 2:
Marketing – Branding - Internet Marketing and Search Marketing

“What we call results are beginnings.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In this chapter we cover the basics of marketing, branding, and connect the dots to search marketing. As you read you will notice that all of our chapters are outlined and self-contained, and this one is one of the most important on Marketing.

The 4 P’s of Marketing, and the one that got away

This maybe all you need to know about marketing, well maybe not, but it is a great primer. Most people don’t know the basic’s of marketing, we not only provide you that, but we go further. We might even give you better insight than a marketing MBA. Because we cover the most ignored principal of marketing, the 5th P. Having made millions with my marketing skills and entrepreneurship, I have not only been a student of marketing, but an enthusiast.

A few of my friends/advisers have Stanford and Harvard MBA’s. They all agree on the fact that SEO and Search Marketing are a must for any business wanting to take advantage of the Internet. As you already know, we cover a lot of these topics in our blogs, but something was missing, so we decided to provide a wholistic marketing approach. We take a step back and provide the basics of marketing and go beyond what is taught at all marketing 101 classes.

If some of you were lucky, smart or blessed enough to study marketing in college you certainly know about the 4 P’s of marketing. The basics have not changed within the years, but what goes in them has. I have been talking about the 4 P’s for 7 years now, and the 5th P, which I will tell you in a second. And hopefully you will agree that it is the most important. Marketing is not just about public relations or advertising, as most people assume. It’s a complex world of strategic positioning, product strategy, product development, product management, branding, and public relations and advertising.

Branding, advertising, public relations and sales are really one of the lagging parts, though very important. The most important lessons of marketing came early on for me, from Anthony Robbins, yes Tony, the great motivational speaker. He talked about the VALS research from Stanford University. The VALS research includes psychographics not just demographics, and profiling different types of people, this is where I got the concept of the 5th P, the most important P of marketing.

The 5th P does not stand for “Process” which is being taught at a national university, the U. of Washington in Seattle. I can’t believe that is what they teach there at U. of Washington. U Dub (as they call it here) is a great school, but folks, process is just a process, it’s not the 5th P, process should be applied to everything we do, to repeat it and make it a science. So listed here are the 4 P’s and the 5th will be discussed in detail below, I bet you already have an idea of what it is.

1. Product: if you don’t have a product, you don’t have anything. A product can also be a service, so for sake of simplicity we will bundle them. Marketing starts with promoting, selling, creating, usually all around the product. Yes there are exceptions, such as within corporate marketing departments, which deal with the brand of the company, but similar principles apply.

2. Price: if you can’t make money selling your product, should you sell it? Or go back to the drawing board. Well you know the answer right? Strategic marketing deals with this issue quite heavily, and helps to have a product matrix and differentiations etc.

3. Place: This is where we will sell the product, retail, online, jewelry parties, it’s the sales channel. I think it’s pretty straight forward, keep it simple and think of it as the place where we sell the products.

4. Promotion: this is the world of public relations, advertising, and call to action sales materials, search marketing, etc, etc. For those of you who study marketing you may already know that eMarketing tools is the fastest growing segment of technology. This is from a recent Gartner report, of July 2007 on marketing automation.

Without, any further ado, the drum rolls rolling, the hearts beating, yes the claps, and church bells ringing. Tadaha… It’s People, People, People, how can the marketing geniuses of the MBA’s forget to teach about “People, the 5th P”. Is process more important than people, no silly professors at U. Dumb, the 5th P is for People.

So what do you need to know about People and marketing?

Forget about demographics, focus on psychographics, and let’s get the data to back up our strategy. It’s the art of understanding not only who our customers are, but what they do, and why they do it. The 5th P of marketing is all about people, you need to know everything about your customers, their profile is just a start. You need to know their likes, dislikes, passions, dreams and aspirations. Where are they going today? How much money are they spending on products that you sell, today and tomorrow?

Tieing it all together: Blogs + SEO + Social Networking = Internet Marketing 2.0

B is for Brand, not just blogging, and it’s more important to build a brand than to just SEO. We want to help you be successful, and that is why our tagline at MyTypes.com is “Blogcast your brand!” Branding is everything in marketing, after you have developed a great product. So what is a Brand, and why should you care? If you build your brand the right way, you won’t just SEO for subject matter keywords such as Jewelry, but people will SEO for your brand name, such as for “Blue Nile” for jewelry. How do you develop such a powerful brand name, especially on the Internet?

People will actually SEO for your brand name, as consumers will be searching for your name, to buy your product or service. And, your competitors will SEO for your brand name, no matter how much they try, you will always be #1 on Google for your brand! Right? Being searched for as a keyword that is your “brand name” is when you have really hit it big, and you than will be the target keyword for your category, and that my friend is the success of a brand and you will have arrived. We will show you not only to SEO blogs here, but to be unique, and to always use and reinforce your Brand name.

Now lets get back to What is a brand and brand building. I am not going to give you a text book definition, because I am not going to refresh my memory with a text book. but tell you everything I have learned and simplify the knowledge of over 15 years. The 15 years come from real life Sr. level marketing positions with top companies and successful technology companies. Isn’t that what you want,

real world, real life experience, instead of text book answers? After receiving my business degree is in Management Information Systems, where one of my favorite subjects was marketing, I started a food company, and had billionaires over for dinner at the age of 25 to buy my company. To this day that is still one of my top 10 achievements. I love the Schwan’s family, but The Schwan’s food company, sent me an offer I had to refuse, so I did, I’ll touch on that lesson later, be patient lad, there is a tie-in to the Schwan’s story of turning lemons in to lemonade at the end of the book.

My love and passion for marketing has never left me, I still love advertisements that make me laugh, brands that stand out and make you think, product branding that is genius. Marketing and product marketing are such an amazing and creative field, but require a lot of skill and market research, which I learned at Gartner and working with top Gartner clients such as Microsoft. Strategic Marketing and strategic positioning is not usually thought of as marketing, people usually talk about brand marketing or marketing promotions and advertisements, as marketing. Hence they miss the boat on it completely because they don’t understand the big picture. I say if you build a brand the right way from the strategy level, then brand building and SEO are easy. It’s not just about getting ranked at the top of the search engines, but to actually sell products and make money. Let’s never forget that brand building and SEO should always be about increasing sales.

I read Adweek and other marketing + business literature and blogs as a hobby, and I still love to look at brands with an awe of success and wonder. My experiences have also lead to me to create a few amazing and fun brand names that even Sr. VP’s at companies like Microsoft chuckle at. “It’s all in a name” is what I say. Thanks to Larry C, who’s nanny helped me develop UrbanTango.com, a real estate portal in 2003. That brand is still admired in the Seattle real estate world, and owned by our company MyTypes.com.

I consider my self an Internet Marketing expert, a position which others may not argue with given my background and results in today’s internet marketing strategies. Way back in 1999, I co-founded an Internet Company, Enthusiasm.com which turned in to Enthusiasm Technologies, that sold to a public company for $8.6Million, Metro One Telecom. Soon there after I founded another company that achieved $1million in revenues in it’s first 11months and $3.2m in it’s second year, Netisen Group, Inc. at Netisen.com.

**As always a plugin for our sponsors web design St. Louis firm ArtworksDesign.com, designer jewelry by Loverelic.com, Air purifiers by Steril Air Purifiers, and don’t forget to buy our Marketing Book it’s now at Amazon.com. And, as always don’t forget to do all of your blogging on our MyTypes.com Free blog platform.