Care.
That’s it. If you care about your marketing, most of the labor is done. It’s what Seth Godin calls emotional labor, and in our economy, nothing means more.
If you care about your marketing, you’re necessarily going to manage the details. Caring creates more work, but if you really care, that’s what you’re looking for.
Your site is going to match your collateral pieces, because you cared enough to realize that design is your first impression. Your message will be the crux of who you are, because you hired a writer to help craft it. You cared enough to spend more time on your strategy than your tactics.
You blog because you care. You pile up your photostream because you care. You spend time using social media to connect people, not to sell, because you care.
In Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation last week at SXSW, he cared enough to:
-Greet everyone coming into the auditorium at the door personally.
-Not use powerpoint.
-Call out a Johnson & Johnson marketer (in a friendly way) for having an agency tweet for them.
-End his presentation with some spontaneous rap and beat boxing at the Q and A microphones.
One point that really struck me about the emotional labor that Gary puts in was what he had to say about projects. He made the (totally believable in his case) point that once he decided to take on a project, he had already succeeded at it.
Not because everything always works out for Gary. Because he’s interested in the process. If you care enough about the process, the result is great marketing.
And we all know what the results of that are.
Tags: Ben Curnett, blogs, business relationships, business trust, content marketing, getting started in social media, marketing mindset, marketing strategy