The Thing No One Told You About Marketing

Mar­ket­ing is all about net­work­ing which is about being social as in mak­ing con­nec­tions that bring peo­ple to buy your stuff. How you fit those con­nec­tions together as a net­work depends on the envi­ron­ment in which you need to work.

The suc­cess of your net­work depends on every­thing from where you live, who lives there, who your stuff can be sold to and how much those folks are will­ing to pay for it.

I  call all of these fac­tors “con­texts”  because they all have some influ­ence on how you go about your busi­ness and whether you’ll have a busi­ness at all! How you deal with the con­texts that influ­ence your busi­ness is also a major fac­tor, in fact I’d almost say it is the key factor.

Con­texts play a key role in mar­ket­ing strate­gies. If you live in East Tim­buktu your strate­gies will look dif­fer­ent than if you live in New York. If you are geared to only sell­ing to the won­der­ful cit­i­zens of E. Tim­buktu  and they’ve never heard of the Inter­net, you def­i­nitely won’t need a web site or even e-mail. Like­wise, if you live in Omaha you won’t likely need to learn how to use car­rier pigeons.

Con­texts come in as many dif­fer­ent fla­vors as there are peo­ple and places, they are gen­er­ally com­bi­na­tions of social, geo­graphic, tech­no­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal fac­tors related to your market.

Social

If you are gear­ing up to sell to the Amish ( assum­ing you have some­thing they would want) your mar­ket­ing needs to con­sider the social con­straints of life in the 18th cen­tury. Short of join­ing their reli­gious com­mu­nity you’ll have to find some way to inter­act with them in per­son. You’ll need to con­sider the fac­tors that would attract a com­mu­nity of sim­ple liv­ing rather reserved folks.

You’ll have to learn how their social net­work func­tions, how they are all con­nected and the key roles in their com­mu­nity. Throw­ing a rous­ing bash to announce the launch of your lat­est thing-a-mabob might not draw a lot of peo­ple and it might end up get­ting you run out of town on a pole.

On the other hand, vol­un­teer­ing to help erect a barn might be just the thing to at least get you a hello.

Geo­graphic

While it cer­tainly could be said that tech­nol­ogy has shrunk the world, all but elim­i­nat­ing geo­graphic bar­ri­ers, geog­ra­phy still remains a fac­tor. If you are sell­ing your stuff on-line geog­ra­phy effects how your won­der­ful stuff is going to get to the folks who buy it. Deliv­ery time in North­west Yukon Ter­ri­tory will be a lot dif­fer­ent than the deliv­ery time in Kansas City.

Geog­ra­phy also effects the way you con­nect, espe­cially if you live on a farm in West­ern Wyoming and inter­net access depends on the fre­quency of solar flares. In this case, sell­ing on-line might be kinda hard… you might want to try pony express.

If live in the frozen tun­dra get­ting out and meet­ing other folks might also be a lit­tle sketchy when the temp drops to –100!

Tech­nol­ogy

If you or your buy­ers are tech­no­log­i­cally chal­lenged, you’re going to expe­ri­ence some seri­ous lim­i­ta­tions on how you com­mu­ni­cate to poten­tial buy­ers, as well as, how your buy­ers find you. The pool of poten­tial buy­ers will prob­a­bly be lim­ited to those rais­ing car­rier pigeons, which is fine if they are your market.

If you live in Appalachia, you’ll not only be influ­enced by the feud­ing clans but also by the fact that there prob­a­bly won’t be a lot, if any bars, on that iPhone of yours. So, you’ll have to get a lit­tle cre­ative at build­ing your network.

Psy­chol­ogy

Are you a peo­ple per­son or…not so much? Does you stuff appeal to a dif­fer­ent mar­ket than you’d like? Just as with the other con­texts your per­son­al­ity, your psy­cho­log­i­cal make up influ­ences every­thing you do from what you make to who you want to sell your stuff to and how want to tell every­one about it.

So…if you are a peo­ple per­son and love meet­ing and get­ting to know new folks you’ll have bet­ter luck build­ing that net­work with other  peo­ple who have a sim­i­lar make-up as you. Try­ing to build a net­work in a com­mu­nity of Nor­we­gian bach­e­lor farm­ers might be dif­fi­cult unless you are offer­ing a dat­ing ser­vice that fea­tures Nor­we­gian sin­gle women who like farm­ing in the mid­dle of nowhere.

If you are shy and shud­der at the thought of putting your­self out there then maybe blog­ging is not the right tool for you to build your net­work. If you freeze up at the thought of meet­ing strange peo­ple then that weekly net­work­ing event the cham­ber puts on might not work so well for you. You might want to try a less pub­lic way of networking.

On the other hand, if you thrive on one on one con­tact but are a lit­tle shy at first a less intim­i­dat­ing way to net­work might be using Face­book, or Twit­ter but you may want to check your fears of tech­nol­ogy  before you sign up.

The Moral of the story…

Before you head off to mar­ket your stuff based on what some­one else said would work really well for you, step back and look at the big pic­ture. What con­text does that way work best? If you’re not a pub­lic per­son then blog­ging or tweet­ing may not work best for you. Like­wise, if your mar­ket is Nor­we­gian bach­e­lor farm­ers who live in nowheresville then Face­book or any­thing else that requires any­thing other than smoke sig­nals to con­nect might be a lit­tle hard to make work.

So…the moral of the story is, how you choose to build your net­work and mar­ket you stuff is,  in the end up to you. And for every­thing to work you will need pay atten­tion to con­text every step of the way.