It is funny how things occur in clusters of coincidences. Two days ago I had to place “no longer available” notices on one of my webpages over at http://japanese-games-shop.com for a pack of Ultraman Hanafuda cards. Then, I read the article about Mitsuta Kazuho the creator of Ultraman and wrote about it in my previous blog…
After that I went out and caught a tram into town.
I do most of my reading on trams and trains. I had with me Seth Godin’s Internet marketing classic, Permission Marketing which, incidentally, is a “must-read” book for anybody who wants to succeed on the Internet today.
It was written about ten years ago, and was about ten years ahead of its time, so it is bang up to date right now! It is a well-written fast, easy-but-thought-provoking read.
When I reached page 24 of Permission Marketing, I had my third “Ultraman” experience of the day:
"I remember when I was about five years old and started watching television seriously. There were only three main channels - 2, 4, and 7, plus a public channel and a UHF channel for when you were feeling adventuresome. I used to watch Ultraman every day after school on channel 29."
Seth Godin is himself a kind of Ultraman of marketing. He comes to the rescue of the little Internet marketer who is fighting the gigantic monsters of Advertising Expenses, Interruption Marketing and Advertising Clutter.
Just how does the little guy get noticed?
Stop wasting your money on “interruption advertising” - Interruption advertising uses ads on television, radio, in the newspapers and magazines, on billboards and so on to “interrupt” people going about their regular activities and shout at them about a product or service.
People have got so used to it that they are now pretty good at filtering out the ads, so marketers respond by filling up more and more space with more and more advertising “clutter”.
It is expensive, and for the little guy at least, and very often the big ones too - it is either ineffective or inefficient and famously difficult to measure. Hundreds and thousands of businesses fold under the strain of marketing expenses.
But there is a solution! Listen to Seth! He has the answer!
If you’ve never heard of “Permission Marketing,” here are some of the chapter headings of Seth Godin’s book that will help to convince you that you don’t need - or rather did not ought to be - fighting the monsters of mass marketing.
Instead, take advantage of the very impersonality of the clutter by concentrating on appealing to people on a warmer and more personal level.
The subtitle of Seth Godin’s book says it all:
Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers.
Chapter headings:
Chapter Two: Permission Marketing - The Way to Make Advertising Work Again.
Chapter Four: Getting Started - Focus on Share of Customer, Not Market Share.
Chapter Five: How Frequency Builds Trust and Permission Facilitates Frequency.
Chapter Six: The Six Levels of Permission.
Chapter Seven: Working with Permission as a Commodity.
Chapter Eight: Everything You Know about Marketing on the Web Is Wrong!
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Contributor's Note
This article was originally published on one of my blogs at: http://grasp-the-nettle.com/TigersCave
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