The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [61]
Sean famously connected with Mark Zuckerberg when TheFacebook was an infant, and played a crucial role in making Facebook what it is today, adding central innovations like photo sharing and friend-tagging, and introducing Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel (whom we’ll meet later in the book), Facebook’s first investor. Facebook is now well on its way to becoming the single point of login and user authentication for a large swath of the Internet. Sean, with a 7 percent stake in Facebook, is now worth billions.
So the first part of marketing has nothing to do with communications or ads or messages. It has to do with the concept of the product or service itself, and how well it is designed to meet needs/ solve the problems of a specific target market. Good marketing, Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, “start[s] with a problem you can solve for a customer (who realizes he has a problem!).”4 Good marketing, in other words, is not something you do after you create the product; the fact that most marketing is done this way is why we hate the word “marketing” so much. If you start with marketing—that is, with thinking about, anticipating, and meeting the needs of a market in an original, effective, compelling way—then that market will be glad to hear about what you’re offering.
Once you’ve designed a product that actually solves someone’s real problem (rather than just solving your own problem of needing more cash!), you’ll still need to let those people know about it. The specific type of communication Dan Kennedy teaches, and which I recommend for most small businesses, is called direct-response marketing. This may have a bad ring to you, because there’s a lot of very bad (and sleazy and cheesy) direct-response marketing out there: junk mail, late-night infomercials, “But Wait, There’s More!, Free Ginsu Knives with Your Order—Only if You Act Now!,” and so on.
But, there are also some very high integrity (and non-cheesy) ways to practice direct-response, as we’ll be learning later in this chapter. And when you get into it, it’s shockingly cost-effective in getting the word out about your company, product, service, cause, mission, or whatever other gift you’re giving to the world. It’s the preferred marketing method for bootstrappers, people who don’t have massive venture investments to burn through in the course of achieving their goals.
What all forms of direct-response have in common is that they’re aimed at causing a specific response to occur—whether it’s joining your newsletter, purchasing your product, making a donation to a cause, or calling a politician to advocate for impending legislation. Whatever you’re up to in the world, direct-response will help.
Most marketing you see out in the world (including the marketing you’ll learn in undergraduate and MBA courses) is what’s called “brand” or “image” marketing. It’s loosey-goosey. It’s not aimed at any response in particular. It gobbles up massive budgets, with the aim of painting a pretty “picture” in your mind of the product or service, or giving you a warm, fuzzy feeling when you think about it—in the hopes that that pretty picture or warm, fuzzy feeling might cause you to buy it, maybe, one day, down the line when you’re in a store and you happen to see the product.
If you’re in business for yourself, you don’t have time or money for that. You need results now. And if you work for a large corporation, you should become their resident expert in direct-response and wow them with the results you