Leverage Your Marketing

My blog consists mostly of general business advice. I can write a post on whatever I see across the great series of tubes that is the internet, and attempt to add my two cents to someone else’s thoughts. I try to direct my readers to things that I deem important to running a small business. My posts have covered finance, management, human resources, marketing, and IT. I write about such a variety because, since before college, I have spent my entire career starting, running, and helping small businesses. I have a particular love for a common sense, buzz-word free, realistic approach to running a business.

My first love in business is Marketing. My degrees are in small business marketing and marketing management. You put my common sense approach together with my love for marketing, and its no secret why I’m always writing about Seth Godin. He shares my passion, except his creativity and ideas blow anyone in the field out of the water.

This week, he wrote a quick little post on internet marketing. He explained that for Big Brands, the internet represents a loss in leverage, since it take more work to reach individuals and they already have big budgets. For individuals, the internet represents an increase in leverage, since reaching people, in many cases, doesn’t cost money- it costs time and effort. One person, he says, with a lot of friends and followers online, can reach more people, more quickly, than ever before.

I want to put that in perspective. My business partner (and brother) has over 1,000 followers on twitter. To be sure, 1,000 people don’t read every post Dan writes, but many people do see and respond to things he writes that interest them. Compare that to Pepsi, Coke, Sony, or any other big brand you can think of (@pepsi has 5 followers). By and large, brands are absent on twitter. In addition, brands can’t blog. Individuals blog and “tweet” and connect with other individuals. That puts you on equal ground with any big brand- maybe even better. All you have to do is spend the time to connect and share with others, and you are marketing. No big budget needed.