Permission Marketing: How to Get Some Bang for Your Buck
September 29, 2011
When I first developed an interest in marketing, I dove in head first. One of my first stops was at Chapters to get more information, and there I saw it.
A title that strikes everybody who passes it: “All marketers are liars”? Good start for a young marketer. I realize marketing may not be regarded as a noble calling like the police or fire fighters, but I was hoping we had a little more dignity in our career than being flat-out liars. After reading the subtitle “The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World” you begin to grasp the direction Seth Godin is headed.
As marketers we endure a lot of harsh criticisms:
“You manipulate people into wanting things they don’t need”
“You breed consumerism and greed.”
“You make people spend money they don’t have.”
With new technologies, like social media, traditional media advertising is being challenged. Traditional marketing has become so pervasive that consumers don’t fall for these old tactics.
Seth Godin’s latest book, Permission Marketing, examines how marketers can cut through the clutter, which will in turn increase Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI), otherwise known as getting some bang for your buck or Cha-Ching!
Rather than interrupting your target audience with your message, permission marketing has the marketer talking to prospects as friends, rather than strangers. “This personalized, anticipated, frequent, and relevant communication has infinitely more impact than a random message displayed in a random place at a random moment,” Godin argues.
Godin clarifies further, using a metaphor of getting married:
“The Interruption Marketer buys an extremely expensive suit. New shoes. Fashionable accessories. Then, working with the best databases and marketing strategists, selects the demographically ideal singles bar.
Walking into the singles bar, the Interruption Marketer marches up to the nearest person and proposes marriage. If turned down, the Marketer repeats this process on every person in the bar. If the Marketer comes up empty-handed after spending the entire evening proposing, it is obvious that the blame should be placed on the suit and the shoes. The tailor is fired. The strategy expert who picked the bar is fired. And the Interruption Marketer tries again at a different singles bar.”
Godin says that this is how most large marketers operate: when their interruption ads don’t work, they fire the agency that developed them. He argues that permission marketing is equivalent to going on a date, and then another and another until the two parties decide to marry. “Permission Marketing is just like dating. It turns strangers into friends and friends into lifetime customers.”
Permission marketing is perfectly suited for social media. Social media foster a community mentality to build loyalty and interaction between buyer and seller. Don’t believe me? Visit Oreo on Facebook. Oreo made a simple post “Oreo cookies and milk go together like…”
What do you think the results from this were: 500 Likes? Sweet! We’re not even close to 500.
Try again. There were over 13,000 Likes and 4,000 comments.
Which do you think creates more awareness and has better ROMI? Free...
or $165,000 for a billboard...
It’s your money. Where do you choose to invest it? If you’d like to read more on Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing, click below to get the first four chapters of his book free: http://bit.ly/119leU If you’d rather see Seth featured on the YouTube sensation BlendTec’s Will It Blend making a Meatball Sundae, click here: http://bit.ly/GoNmu
Andrea Migchelsen
