Difference between revisions of "Learn/Online-Marketing-is-the-New-Marketing"

Getting Found by Customers              
By Ray King
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TV commercials, billboards, magazine ads and e-mail spam are all designed to interrupt our consumption of other content and steal our attention away. These forms of traditional marketing have provided excellent ROI for many years as the art of deciding where and when to place an ad has become a refined science.

With the advent of tons of information becoming available online and users being able to get to it anywhere and anytime, we are becoming less tolerant of being interrupted, given that we can easily search for information and get it. People promoting their products isn't a problem, in fact, we crave product information, but WHEN we want it. We generally don't like being interrupted (well, Superbowl ads aside).

Internet access everywhere and search allow us to get TO vendors, rather than have them come and interrupt us. So the promoter's challenge (your challenge if you are a marketer), is to put enough quality information out there so that you can be easily found by the right buyer at the right time.

Below are some great books on how to do just that and more importantly, how to get into the right mindset. It's easy, it's also a lot of work and it's also the future of marketing!

Having created Webmaster Central at Google, Vanessa Fox is an SEO expert from the inside out. In this book, Marketing In The Age Of Google, she explains how online search often leads to offline purchases and other key high level concepts. What is unusual is how well the explanations then transform to the tactical steps. The methods are sophisticated and well explained.

{{{2}}} (visit) ~ Gary Vaynerchuk is so excited by the possibilities of Social Media that he practically screams it out in this short and inspirational book. He was not a tech head when he stared, but with some hard work and common sense and turned his knowledge and curiosity about wines into a huge success. It's a great story and highly motivational for anyone who wants to turn a personal passion into an online business.

{{{2}}} (visit) ~ Outbound marketing is what we did; Inbound marketing is what we need to do. The title of this book defines an ethos and an era that divides the new marketers from the old. The book is chock full of practical advice for companies wanting to get found by their prospective customers using search. Authors Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shaw are also the founders of Hubspot.com and creators of WebsiteGrader.com.

{{{2}}} (visit) ~ It's hard to believe that someone could make a great living and career working just 4 hours a week -- and I don't really believe him when he says that. But this book is compelling because it's all possible in today's world. He teaches us how to outsource just about everything necessary to run a small business online. This includes product design, sourcing, lead generation, website design, order taking, customer support, etc. He also explains a critical lesson in market research -- measure your audience's willingness to buy as early as possible ... and don't ask your friends, they're useless in giving you objective feedback. Make people take out their credit cards, then you'll know. Tim is also very disciplined in his approach and this book gets you in that mindset. He's wonderfully merciless.

GroundSwell, by Charlene Li ~ Crazy that she hasn't registered GroundSwellBook.com, so I did. And she can have it anytime. Understanding UGC, the types of contributors and how you can ride a groundswell of user action.

What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis. The Domain WhatWouldGoogleDo.com looks like a parked page that someone in London (other than Jeff) has -- that's a bummer, he should really have it. I found the first half of this book very insightful and well worth the read. The second half describes how a little Google-think could be employed in different industries and sectors and I found that a bit less inspired.