7 things I learned about marketing from Seth Godin and Alex Hormozi

Bridget here and I'm a bit of a nerd!

I love coming back to books like “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin and a newer one, “$100m Leads” by Alex Hormozi.

1. “Marketing Creates culture, status and affiliation.” - Seth Godin—This is really about…why do people buy? They aren’t just buying the product, they’re buying what the purchase of that product says about them. Think designer hand bags. Some of them aren’t even good looking or nice, but it’s about the affiliation with that brand that makes someone think you’re a certain type of person. Luxury cars do this too. Ex. REI and Patagonia—through a purchase of their products, you are affiliating yourself as adventurous, thrill seeker, outdoorsy.
2. Know Your People - inspired by Seth Godin— “Who’s it for bc you can’t change everyone.” I find this really helpful actually. Knowing that you can just focus on your people who want something and how your product/service can be the solution to that. It becomes simple math. Say your people are health conscious women who care about what goes on their skin. So all products you make are organic, palate free, BPA free, all the frees, fragrance free, nothing synthetic. It’s more expensive but these women will pay because they value health over money in the moment. By knowing your people everything is easier.
3. The Best ideas aren’t instantly embraced - Seth Godin—you need to create change through your message, words, ads. You have to build trust. We’ve felt this for the Visibility on Purpose company. Entrepreneurs who haven’t worked for big companies where there was a PR team have little knowledge about PR. We’ve been on an education journey for this past year. You have to disrupt to create change. There was toothpaste story I shared on a previous podcast about this too. No one used toothpaste in the early 1920s. So a branding guy found a way to get ppl to use toothpaste. He highlighted the gross feel of the teeth and how the solution was…you guessed it… toothpaste.
4. Don’t Make Your Product for Everyone — For instance, our program pitch party certainly isn’t for everyone. Larger companies already have in-house PR teams to handle crisis management, media outreach, brand reputation all of those things. Companies making over $250k in revenue likely would hire a publicist bc they don’t want to learn to pitch for themselves. We are serving the authors, product-companies on the rise, small business owners who want to learn to do this for themselves now (and don’t want to scour the internet to learn themselves). It’s not for everyone. The question I love to ask here is what is your customer experiencing at the moment, what are they feeling, what have they already tried to solve their problem? Speak to THOSE people at that exact moment.
5. Understand the problem-solution cycle - Alex Hormozi—All businesses solve some problem for a very specific person who’s experiencing something. If you have acne, the problem is acne, discomfort, embarrassment, and if there’s a product to help combat that, you will buy it. And if you’re really smart you can then help that person at the next stage of their journey. Computer companies do this well who always come up with new updates, although it’s annoying!
6. Use simple language that anyone can understand - both of them say this—Alex hormozi is really good at this. His book $100m leads is written at a 5 year old level. I’ve seen this a lot in the personal transformation world, trying to use really lofty, generic transformational words in their copy + sales stuff — it doesn’t work. People want REAL life examples in the language they’d use.
7. Good Brands tell Stories—think about all advertising tv commercials. They hardly even talk about the product, they are telling a visual story that tugs at the emotions. ASPCA - Sarah McLachlan— all those poor animals without homes/money. Drug commercials — if you’re in pain, take this drug to be with your family again by taking this drug. Olay - “love the skin you’re in”. So how can we take this knowledge and bring stories into our own work? What’s the story that we’re actually telling here? What happens as a result of what we sell? That’s what people actually want.
8. *Oh and one more….Jim Edwards, Copywriting Secrets. “No one wants to be sold to but they love to buy things and spend money”

Are these helpful? Let us know by tagging us on Instagram!