by Eric Brown

I set off a small firestorm the other evening when I Re-Tweeted the following tweet; “RT @KathySierra: “WONDERING HOW IT IS THAT WE CAN BE HORRIFIED BY THE FINANCIAL CRISIS YET NOT SEE MOST ADVERTISING AS A HORRIFIC WASTE OF MONEY”

 For those not familiar with Twitter, a RE-Tweet is just that, you re-tweet someone else’s tweet. A tweet is a 140 character or less statement you type for anyone who follows you on twitter to read.  So, I didn’t originate the phrase, “Wondering how it is that we can be horrified by financial crisis yet not see most advertising as a horrific waste of money” but I sure did resonate with it, and this was Pre Super Bowl.  

IS YOUR ADVERTISING ADDING VALUE
A point of this blog post is to just point out that there are new and different ways to market your Product Offering, and that the “Way we have always done it may not be AS effective.” One of the tweeters in the firestorm went on and on telling about how irresponsible it is to Not Advertise. My point was consistently, “Is Your Advertising or Marketing Adding Value” and the bottom line is, most of the time the answer is NO, Your Marketing is NOT adding any value and Your Advertising is a Horrific Waste of Money.

THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY
As I navigate these challenging economic times in our own small business, marketing continues to both amaze and baffle me. In 2004 we ceased all traditional marketing tactics in exchange for Social Media Marketing. For clarification, I dump everything into the Marketing Bucket. We work hard to train our folks we work with that everything that we do is Marketing. Irrespective of if you have on the PR hat, the Customer Service hat, the Advertising Hat, It is all Marketing. And, we are communicating our Brand at every step.  

Interestingly, In our boutique apartment management business, as we aborted traditional marketing and applied Social Media Marketing, our new traffic leads never declined, in fact they went up. What was fascinating is that our Google ranking for apartment search in our local area continued to climb, and now rests consistently on page one Google. We are not SEO gurus by any stretch. We went in a diametrically different direction than anyone else in our business, and our traffic leads went up as well as our search optimization, How is that?

THERE IS A BETTER WAY
As we trended further away from traditional marketing methods, we deployed available marketing dollars in a different direction. We aimed them at our Core Resident Base, at our Customer. While practicing Social Media and the transparency that comes with it, we experienced and practiced humbleness. After all, when you are called out when you drop the ball for everyone out there to see it, it is a bit humbling. But along the way, as we continued to look inward something else started to happen, We Created Customer Evangelists, and they helped us Rent Apartments.

When you market inward, and Enhance the Customer Experience  you get a compound return on your marketing dollar. You have made an existing customer happy, and at the same time marketing your product. What would happen if everyone Marketed Inward, and Enhanced Their Customers Experience

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Continue Reading: ADVERTISING, A HORRIFIC WASTE OF MONEY

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