Ep. 066 – Mark Schaefer “Marketing is sick right now. It’s too tech-centric instead of human-centric… If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business.”
Mark W. Schaefer Show Notes Mark W. Schaefer is a globally recognized author, speaker, podcaster, and business consultant who blogs at {grow} — one of the top five marketing blogs of the world. He teaches graduate marketing classes at Rutgers University and has written six best-selling books, including The Tao of Twitter (the best-selling book on Twitter in the world) and The Content Code, named by INC. magazine as one of the top five marketing books of the year, and his new book KNOWN: The handbook for building and unleashing your personal brand in the digital age. Mark also wrote the classic first book on influence marketing, Return On Influence. His many global clients include Pfizer, Cisco, Dell, Adidas, and the US Air Force. He has been a keynote speaker at prestigious events all over the world, including SXSW, Marketing Summit Tokyo, and the Institute for International and European Affairs. He has appeared as a guest on media channels such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CBS News. Most passionate about I’m a person who is always looks forward, so I’m always in the process of reinvention. I tend to be almost obsessed with the big problems in our business. When I wrote my last book, Known, it was about how creating an effective, powerful personal brand is really the only sustainable, competitive advantage we can have. I was addressing the question: Could anybody become known? The question I’m wrestling with now is that everywhere I go, marketing seems to be stuck. There are a few symptoms: People are over whelmed by technology in marketing They are over using technology in marketing They’re stuck in ineffective patterns Many of the companies today, either big or small have social media departments that were established in 2010 to 2014, and I can assure you that almost none of the outputs these teams are producing have been updated. So much has been changed with social media during the last years. The idea that I have is that marketing is too tech-centric instead of human-centric. We don’t want to talk with our customers anymore; we just want to monitor them on Twitter. We automate everything and we are loosing our hearts, our souls, and our way. Marketing is sick right now! What is marketing, according to Mark? Get out and talk to customers. The truth is out there. Marketing is finding un-met and under-served needs and creating demand to those needs in a unique way. Hopefully by establishing an emotional connection. I love working with entrepreneurs and startup communities; I love their energy. But the biggest frustration I have is that marketing is almost always overlooked. Startups and entrepreneurs are in love with an idea, or with a business model. They think that marketing is DIY (Do It Yourself), they think that they can read some blog posts and do it. But marketing is about finding and acquiring customers. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business. Marketing is HARD! It’s really hard. But you’ve got to address it. And if you aren’t a natural marketer or trained in marketing, you’ve got to get help! Because marketing is really the centerpiece of your business; no matter how good your idea is, no matter how much you are in love with it, if you don’t have customers you are not going to have a business! Mark’s best advice about approaching customers I asked a young marketer that wanted my advice whether he talked with the company’s customers, or joined their sales people? He was already six months in that position and never talked with a single customer! You should talk with your customers and ask them: What do you love about your business? What do you hate about your business? What keeps you awake at night? How can we serve you better? Biggest failure with a customer It wasn’t necessarily a failure with my customers; it was a failure with me. I don’t enjoy selling and self-promotion.