If your marketing doesn’t bring new people to your business or keep existing customers coming back, you’re failing. 

As much as I write about (and believe) that marketing needs to be helpful; that’s not the objective. 

The objective is to move a person – and we should never lose sight that we’re talking about people when we discuss lists and names and customers and “eyeballs” and traffic – to buy our product or service.

To trot out Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross again: The purpose of marketing is to get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

You need names. 

When I created this list of topics, I originally did have “people” rather than “names” here, but I needed “P” for a different idea I wanted to write about (stay tuned for that one!). 

Don’t Forget It’s People

Most of the marketing work I gravitate to (Seth Godin, Copyblogger, Ann Handley, and Marcus Sheriden to name a few) focuses on cultivating a service mentality as you market to your customer.

Coming from my editorial background where the goal is to serve the reader, I find my personal values align with this philosophy. 

My thinking behind every piece I published:

ain’t nobody reading this magazine for fun, how do I serve up useful information with each issue?

There is a lot of marketing “stuff” out there that doesn’t – or is fake service (egads, the number of “become an excellent copy writer” ads for the low, low cost of A LOT OF MONEY almost all smell desperate to sell a service). 

When you’re in a strategy meeting and talking about “feeding the funnel,” it’s easy to get caught up in the how’s of what you’re trying to do and forget the why. 

Looking at stats and thinking about drawing “eyeballs” to your marketing can easily start having your care only about the next click. 

As you get into the tactics of how you’re going to attract people to you, never forget each click is a person.

What are you doing for them? 

Names are people too. Never forget it. 

Need help creating your content marketing strategy and/or content? Drop me a line at duhonius@gmail.com, reply below, or give me a call (or text, text is better, what with all the phone spam) at 301-275-7496.

About the Cheeky A-Z Guide to Content Marketing.

There are groaning shelves of books and whitepapers you can read about content and inbound marketing. What’s missing from (some) of them is the stuff between the cracks. The dirty, nuts and bolts examples of things that can go wrong and the random things that can go wonderfully well. I decided to run down the alphabet a letter at a time and highlight personal lessons learned from creating content for 25 years and from applying those content creation lessons to content marketing over the past decade-ish. I hope you enjoy.