Gold Standard Marketing

Helping authors navigate the business side of craft

If I were to ask you for a definition of the term marketing, how would you answer?

Go ahead. Think on it. I’ll wait.

There. That didn’t take long. Put your hand up if you arrived at a definition along these lines:

Marketing is the practice of trying to sell someone a product?

Sounds about right, doesn’t it? If it does, you’re on solid ground. Merriam-Webster offers this as a definition:

The process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.

Pretty much the same thing, only with fancy-pants wording.

There’s a problem though.

If you believe this definition you’ll fail at all the marketing you do.

I’m not casting shade on dictionaries. They’re merely reflecting back what people think the term means. That’s what a dictionary does.

If you follow their definition though you’ll try to sell a product at people. You’ll try to convince them to buy. You may even try to outright talk them into it against their will.

I don’t deny that this type of marketing exists. It might even have been effective once upon a time.

It’s not any more. And certainly not for books.

A better definition of marketing goes like this:

Marketing puts a potential buyer in touch with a product they want.

The best time to sell someone water is when they’re thirsty.

You get the drift. This is a profound shift. You can now see that targeting is part of marketing. Targeting is the foundation of it. A failure of targeting would be to try to sell bananas to a banana farmer. During harvest season.

When you think of marketing like this, you’re not trying to sell at people. You’re selling for people. You’re giving them what they want.

Your conversion rates will spike when you do this. Customer satisfaction will spike. You’ll spend less for more results. And you won’t feel icky about it.

Good marketing builds a bridge to get someone to a nice place where they want to go.