If you’re a business owner and are tired of the lack of results from your marketing efforts that used to work, but are no longer effective, welcome to the world of New Marketing.  Everything from Yellow Page Ads to direct mail to newspaper advertising has been affected by all the new media available and it’s only accelerating.

The problem with it is that Old Marketing isn’t targeted, can’t be changed quickly and typically interrupts people and bugs them to get their attention.  Look at newspaper advertising for example, it’s targeted by what section of the paper the ad is in.  At best, you can target what gender the reader is and nothing more.  Put an ad in the sports section and you will have men reading it.  They could be 16 or 60, could make $10k/year or $150k/year, are black, white, hispanic and asian and could have any level of education.  What can you advertise in the sports section that would appeal to the majority of the readers there?  A sandwich?  Not much else would appeal to the whole readership and anything more niched would be too risky to find out if that particular paper had enough ideal readers that would be interested in your product.

Old Marketing is coined by Seth Godin as the mass advertising that sold average products to average people in large quantities.  This was epitomized by Tide detergent running TV ads in the ’50’s and ’60’s and making a fortune doing it.  Godin relates products like that to ‘meatballs’ since they’re plain, made for everyone and the marketing plan that goes with them is equally as plain.

Now enter the world of New Marketing… social media, educational focused, permission based, niche targeted and online.  These marketing channels are like whipped-cream and sprinkles compared to the marinara sauce that used to go so well selling meatballs all day.  You simply cannot expect to use the new marketing tools with an old product.  It has to be changed.

So what do you do?

You start small and you set goals.  Let’s say you are an attorney and you specialize in business formation and entity structure.  Setup a twitter account and start posting once or twice a day with a link to something interesting related to what you help clients with.  It could be an article you read about the pitfalls of forming your own corporation online or a lawsuit where a company was being sued for trademark infringement because they didn’t check the USPTO.gov site before launching their new product.  Then put a link to your twitter account in your signature and a call to action saying ‘Follow me on twitter and get great tips on how to protect your company and brand’.  Email everyone you know with a link to your new account and ask them to follow you and you promise to not promote Amway or Viagra on it.

If you do this one thing and do it diligently, you can grow your follower base to over 1,000 followers in a matter of months and then can start weaving in overt requests for business here and there, turning those followers into paying clients.

This is just one of a hundred different little things you can do to start leveraging New Marketing and stop wasting your hard earned money on the Old Marketing that doesn’t work any more.

If you want a free strategy session on how to apply this to your business, contact us and we’ll show you how to do it and how we can help if we think it’s a fit.