This Is Marketing

Seth Godin

📚 GENRE: Business & Finance

📃 PAGES: 288

✅ COMPLETED: September 16, 2020

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

In This Is Marketing, Seth Godin delivers the core fundamentals that he’s taught to entrepreneurs, marketers, and leaders in industries across the business landscape. Godin explains how to identify a target audience, craft attractive content, develop effective marketing strategies, and more.

Key Takeaways

1️⃣ Identify Your Target Audience — You have to narrow down the type of customer you want to serve. If you’re too broad, you’re messaging won’t be focused enough. Get a clear picture of the type of customer your product or service will help the most and target your messaging at that group of people.

2️⃣ The Customer Comes First — Good marketing shows how your product or service will help solve a problem or make him/her better in some way. Identify how your product or service can help customers, then create messaging and marketing content that hits on those benefits.

3️⃣ Track Results — Always track the progress and effectiveness of your ads and marketing content. Set up analytics so you know which assets are performing well and which are not. Invest your time and resources in the assets and strategies that are proving to be successful.

Favorite Quote

"It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services."

Book Notes 📑

Introduction

  • Good marketing focuses on how the product or service solves the customer’s problem.

Chapter 1

  • In marketing, you have to know your audience inside and out.

Chapter 2 & 3

  • Good marketing shows how the product or service can help customers become a better version of themselves.
  • Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
  • People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them and how it will make them feel.
    • Who is the product for? What’s the product for? Answer these. 
  • Always think about the customer. Their wants. Their needs. Their desires.

Chapter 4

  • Focus on creating change and making change happen. Focus on this in your messaging and content.

Chapter 5

  • Empathy is at the heart of good marketing. You have to put yourself in the customer’s position.
  • Be specific when you position your product or service. Zone in on the target audience.

Chapter 6

  • Don’t position yourself as a “high-quality product.” Most companies generally produce high-quality products, so that’s not really a differentiator for you.
  • Have a story! Build your customer experience around that story.
    • How are you changing a customer’s life? What difference are you making?
  • A good story:
    • Connects your purpose to the company.
    • Highlights your strengths as a company.
    • Highlights your values and how you are different from the competition.
    • Builds brand recognition.
    • Attracts like-minded employees.
    • Keeps you motivated to continue doing great work.
  • Craft your story after identifying your target audience. Craft your story so that it aligns with what your target audience wants to hear.

Chapter 7

  • Your marketing should be revolved around how the product or service is going to change the customer for the better.
    • People buy your product for what it can do for them, not for the product itself. They buy it for the change it can make in their life.
      • So, base your marketing around that positive change.
  • People buy your product to get closer to their goals and dreams.
    • You have to identify those goals and dreams and help the customer get closer to them. Tell a story that connects with that goal and dream.
  • Customers also buy products for the feelings it gives them.
    • Feelings of success, status, superiority, etc.

Chapter 8

  • Don’t be too broad with your target audience. Really zero in on a small, niche market and try to make them into super fans.
  • Quote: “It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.”

Chapter 9

  • Don’t be too broad with your target audience. Really zero in on a small, niche market and try to make them into super fans.

Chapter 10

  • Once you’ve identified it, focus on the target audience always.

Chapter 11

  • Social status is one of the big factors that drives our actions.
    • People want status. They want to be looked at in a certain way.
  • People identify themselves in a certain way and fight to defend that identity.
  • Every big decision we make is based on our perception of status and how it might change after the decision is made.
  • Two types of status: Internal and External
    • Internal — How you see yourself internally.
    • External — How others see us.

Chapter 15

  • There are three core elements that make online advertising really effective:
    1. You can reach people more precisely online than on any other media.
    2. You can reach people instantly.
    3. You can measure everything and determine an ROI.
  • Direct Response Marketing — Can easily be measured. Always try to measure your marketing collateral. This helps you make decisions as to whether to keep doing similar things, or abandon a certain marketing strategy altogether.

Chapter 18

  • Action leads to trust for customers. How you act and handle things contributes to customers trusting you or not trusting you.

Chapter 19

  • You always want to get repeat customers. Do everything you can to acquire customers that come back routinely.
  • Think of Direct Response Marketing as a funnel.
    • It starts with an online ad
    • Which leads to a click to your website
    • Which leads to a click to another part of your website
    • Which leads to your offer
    • Which leads to a sale