Developing an Online Marketing Plan – 3 Key Ingredients

I’m reading Seth Godin’s new book.  If you know me at all, this may not be a surprise.  🙂

In the book, he makes a point that applies to any of us building a business and developing an online marketing plan.  He writes, “Scarcity and abundance have been flipped.  High quality work is no longer scarce.  Competence is no longer scarce, either.  We have too many good choices – there’s an abundance of things to buy and people to hire.

What’s scarce is trust, connection, and surprise.  These are three elements in the work of the successful artist.”

He defines an artist as someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to create change.

And as a coach, author, speaker – an artist – isn’t that what you’re looking to do?  To create change.  To help people that are stuck in one place and helping them get somewhere new. 

What he’s saying is right.  There a millions of us out there.  Authors, speakers, coaches, and entrepreneurs.  It’s a challenge to stand out amongst all the noise.  How do we break through?  How can we increase our sales and grow our influence?

Part of the answer is to focus our time and energy creating:

• Trust,
• Connection, and
• Surprise.

Trust.  We build trust by following through on what we say we’re going to do.  We also do it by consistently providing solutions to our audience’s problems.  Therefore our blog posts, books, seminars, etc need to be focused on solving problems.  When we do that enough times we become the go-to person.  We become a resource.  Trust is invaluable and we can’t ever stop building it.   So keep producing content, keep solving problems, and don’t stop writing and creating.

Connection.  Social technologies constantly change.  But what will never change is the human desire to connect to each other.  Innovative entrepreneurs that focus on building communities will win the day.  One of our brilliant partners, Dating Coach Betty Russell is building what she calls her “Dating Success Circle.”  This is a community of her clients who have access to her via a private forum on her website and bi-weekly tele-conferences.  She’s connecting like-minded people with similar goals.  Her community members will get exclusive access to Betty’s expertise AND they will be able to connect with one another to share ideas and offer support.  This is how change happens.  All Betty is doing is setting the table and getting the community organized.  We think this is brilliant.

Surprise.  As a marketer we must be thinking about ways to surprise and delight our clients and customers.  To have them step back and say, “WOW!  She is awesome!”  This can be done in a variety of ways.  It can be a special unexpected bonus included with a customer’s order, it can be a hand written thank you note, it can be creating a community on your website, or … you tell me.  There are countless ways to over-deliver.  When you do this, you stand out, you create loyalty, and maybe most important you get your community telling others about you.  That’s more powerful than any advertising or marketing you do.

What’s exciting is that doing this kind of work builds a rock solid business.  As Godin says, “The risk involved in digging deep to connect and surprise, the patience to build trust, the guts necessary to say, ‘I made this’ – are scarce and valuable.  And they scale. (emphasis added)”

It’s an exciting time to be building a business.  The rules have changed and isn’t that great?!?

What do you think?  What are you doing to create trust, connection, and surprise with your audience?  How can we help you?

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