Nothing Sells Itself (GoNerdify experience)

Nothing sells itself. Okay, maybe that isn’t entirely true: something so essential you absolutely can’t live without it might find easy customers. Picture the man whose camel breaks down in the middle of the desert; he has no water or food, the sun is high in the sky, he first walks, then sinks to his knees and crawls, then drags himself across the burning sand. Suddenly, there it is: an oasis. He struggles to the edge of the water and lowers his hand to scoop some up when a voice says, “That’ll be 10 rials. Please.” You think that man is going to argue? He’s dying of thirst and here’s the solution.

For most of us, though, it isn’t like that. The world at large doesn’t absolutely have to have our product — and, even if it does, we are unlikely to be the only people offering it. And the further our product or service is from the basic “water in the desert” survival level, the more people there are selling against it. Rolls-Royce (the carmaker, not the aero engine guys) will tell you that their competition isn’t other top end automobile companies so much as alternative uses for the luxury discretionary dollar: expensive yachts; private beaches; a personal cinema in the basement of a house in a place most people can’t afford.

Basic services or luxury products, the vital element is selling. And the engine of selling is marketing.

To have any hope of success, marketing needs a plan. A strategy. You can watch what other people are doing and copy it, but that won’t really give you what you need because no other company has exactly the mix of products, customers and opportunities that you have. You need a strategy of your own.

Deciding what forms of marketing to use — Instagram or Twitter; blogging or Facebook; or how about TV and good old billboards? — is not defining a strategy. Those things come after the strategy has been set. Think of your marketing strategy as a roadmap that tells you how to get from where you are to where you want to be. The importance of the strategy is that without it — without that roadmap — it really doesn’t matter what form of transport you choose; you won’t reach your destination.

And the place you start from is not the office, factory or warehouse; it’s your BRAND. A marketing strategy should be designed to increase the awareness and the reputation of the brand. I don’t care how much you spent on other assets; your brand is the most valuable thing you own.

In the Internet age, brand reputation can grow at an exponential rate. It can be destroyed just as quickly. Your marketing strategy needs to be designed so that you know not who your customers are but who they should be. It is built on an understanding of what those customers want, how their wants can most efficiently be met, and how to get them to spread the word. The last two decades provide many examples of companies that appeared from nowhere and became huge successes, as well as others that started big and ended in bankruptcy. The successes had two things in common: they designed a coherent marketing strategy and they implemented it. The failures did not.

If you want to understand just how important marketing strategy is, those two sentences will tell you. Working at Nerdify (gonerdify.com) I see it every day.