Marketing Type

Are you annoyed yet?

You can catch me tonight (or any other day should you choose to download the podcast version) on the David Lawrence Show on XM Radio (about an hour from now) talking about the Internet-spawned terms most likely to annoy people. In a throwback to a previous incarnation, I am appearing as a spokesperson for the Blooker Prize.

Time to Get Serious About Blogging

It's time to get serious again about blogging after having spun through a small handful of unrelated obsessions over the past few months. I've been busy reshaping the landscape around my home, with many hours spent clambering through mud with a shovel and long days operating heavy equipment I probably have no business getting near (with subsequent evenings avoiding heavy sighs expertly operated by my spouse, whose kitchen looks directly onto the scene of devastation I have wrecked in the back yard).

In the process of doing all of this I've met and spoken with at least a dozen small business owners -- landscapers, rock purveyors,  rental shop owners and equipment dealers -- some of whose businesses remain all but invisible to customers seeking information on the Internet. They know they should improve their web marketing and may even have taken a few steps in that direction, but some still don't have the basics in place:

1. A web site with content comprehensible to search engines like Yahoo! and Google.
2. A basic paid search advertising program.
3. Simple email-driven customer relationship management.

I don't mean to chastise small business owners with little in the way of time or resources to devote to on-line marketing -- I can't afford to chastise anyone given that my own web site is still on the launch pad -- but meeting a smattering of local business owners has provided me with a powerful reminder of the value of the guidance I, or someone like me, can offer businesses. I'm grateful to be in a position to offer real, concrete help. MarketingType will, I hope, eventually become a resource for some of the many businesspeople out there going it alone, who can't afford to pay a consultant or a company to do this stuff for them.

Bug-Eyed Logo?

 

Well, I think we may finally be getting close to a  decision on a logo for the new agency. Once a logo is finalized, you invest a fair amount in it. Apart from branding considerations, there are stationary, cards, and sales collateral to print in addition to whatever logos wind up on the Web. The deliberation has been lengthy, but this version seems reasonably durable to me, even though the file to the left is not rendering very well for some reason.

For the curious, I'll post sketches of some of the steps that brought us to this version:

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Speaking at the Triangle Chapter of the American Marketing Association 12/21

                       

On December 21, I am scheduled to speak at the monthly luncheon of the  Triangle Chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA). At a  country club. No doubt I'll be a bit of a fish out of water.  Fortunately being a fish out is consistent with my message about taking  an unconventional approach to marketing and pr.		--fish out of water--

Which reminds me-- one of the last  projects I worked on for Lulu before leaving is finally bearing fruit this  week: the world's oldest self-published author. He is one Francis L. Bartels, 97, native of Ghana, now a resident of Paris.
[pls. note that had I still been present this story never would have gone out without at least giving Mr. Bartels a decently constructed web storefront. Sigh.]

Test Post for New Design

Testing out a new design for Marketing Type, as well as a draft logo for Bug-Eyed Marketing. Thoughts?

Looking for a marketing type?

I am pleased to introduce Marketing Type, a (soon-to-be) blog about online marketing, and an extension of the communications efforts of my new marketing agency, Bug-Eyed Marketing, located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is also a long-postponed successor to my most recent blog, Tenebris, a publishing blog.

More than one person has responded to the announcement of my new venture with a polite pause, followed by a carefully phrased question: What is online marketing, exactly?

It is a perfectly reasonable question, but as with marketing in the broader sense online marketing is easier to convey with examples than with a formal definition. In terms of the services offered by Bug-Eyed Marketing, online marketing includes, but is not limited to, the following:

I. Search engine marketing (SEO), which is itself broken into at least three categories:

• paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC)
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• contextual advertising, which these days can take the familiar forms of banners and text ads, but also video.

II. Niche marketing, or identifying and interacting with online communities by taking advantage of social media like blogs, wikis, online forums, and (less glamorously) through email or events. If you compare effective online niche marketing with the old world of direct mail and expensive print and tv advertising, it seems astonishingly mundane. In fact, this kind of marketing consists mostly of talking with people--with honesty, conviction, and sensitivity-- about the things that interest them. But oddly enough a lot of companies still seem to find it hard to interact with their customers as people. For that reason, companies like Bug-Eyed Marketing can still offer useful advice.

III. Unconventional public relations (PR), or the art of creating buzz. One of the  much-abused cliches to describe this odd arena is viral marketing. A slightly less epidemiological description often used is word-of-mouth marketing. But the kind of PR I am talking about is really an extension of the values embodied in the two items above: In order to interest people, do something interesting. Novel, isn't it?

It took me a long time to figure out that I was a marketing type. As a young man, I traveled loaded with ready vitriol on the topic of marketing, which seemed to me to be synonymous with advertising. It is worth noting, in passing, that advertising was also my father's business. But I have a different angle on it now--partly because of the fantastic democratization being wrecked by the Internet, partly because I've redefined marketing in a way that suits my temperament, and partly of course because of changes in me as I've grown older.

My father died earlier this year. He was an entrepreneur for over three decades, having founded Fraser Advertising, Inc., in Atlanta, Georgia, when he was barely past the age of 30 with a family looming before him. He retired in 1995, when I was still a wild-haired malcontent living on the opposite coast. Fraser Advertising was a different kind of business than the one I am trying to launch now, but my greatest hope is to do as well by my family as did my father, and to earn anything like the trust from my clients that he earned from his. Wish me luck.