I have talked at length about the importance of owning your marketing. As a matter of fact, I consider it to be one of the pillars of Scrappy Marketing. In the past, you weren't able to own your marketing. You had to rent or lease it. That meant you were buying listings in the phone book, placing ads in the local newspaper or even running the occasional television commercial or trade ad. Unfortunately when you stopped sending those media checks, the music stopped playing. You were basically just leasing access to someone else's audience. And sometimes that's perfectly ok, especially when we're talking about a very engaged audience and a campaign that allows you to measure results. For example, I'll buy ads on Google all day long as long as I am able to hit my acquisition targets.
But regardless, it makes sense for you to build your own marketing assets. Marketing assets that you can control, and allow you to build an audience yourself . Here are some examples of such:
Dell owns their Twitter feed where they sell products at a discounted price.
Bosley owns BattleAgainstBald.com where they let customers tell their stories.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes authors put on the annual Feast of the Seven Fishes Festival.
You own your website.
Starbucks owns the user generated My Starbucks Idea forum where they gather ideas directly from consumers (as opposed to paying for focus groups).
Building an audience isn't that hard anymore, and oftentimes individuals actually do a much better job than large corporations. For more examples of such, check out audienceshift.com.
I own this blog and my personal rule of thumb is that other if your advertising generates a positive ROI, you're better advised to invest into building your own marketing assets. How much of your marketing dollars are currently being allotted towards buying ads versus building assets?
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